Real Presence
What can happen when a thoroughly secular woman eats a piece of bread. A review of 'Jesus Freak.'
Review by John Wilson | posted 7/22/2010 09:22AM
We don't think of the Eucharist as a vehicle for conversion. We have forgotten the history of our own founding. Among the first Christians, the Eucharistic meal was an act of fellowship that often attracted newcomers—so many, in fact, as to pose a problem for fledgling churches. Not all participants in the sacred meal understood what it meant (insofar as we are ever capable of that) or honored its meaning. Gradually the Eucharist was limited to believers who had undergone a lengthy catechesis. A necessary corrective? Perhaps, but one loaded with the irony of unintended consequences. A millennium later, on a typical Sunday, the priest celebrated the Eucharist while the congregation looked on.
"One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six," Sara Miles writes in Take This Bread,
I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans—except that up until that moment I'd led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.
Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I'd scorned and work I'd never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer but actual food—indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I'd been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.
Everything in Miles's two memoirs, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (Ballantine, 2008) and Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead (Jossey-Bass, 2010), flows from this moment, and after a cumulative 454 pages, its meaning is far from being exhausted.
From Rejection and BackAll conversions are instances of the same irreducible mystery, and each conversion is unique. Miles's grandparents on both sides of the family were missionaries. While my own mother was a little girl living in Shanghai with her missionary parents, Miles's father was born in Burma, where his parents were serving under the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society; Miles's mother was "carried in a laundry hamper across the ocean to Baghdad" by parents serving with the United Mission in Mesopotamia.
By the time Miles was born, her mother and father had decisively rejected the Christian faith. When Miles herself was grown, she was drawn abroad by the needs of others, as her grandparents had been. But during her sojourn as a journalist in Nicaragua and El Salvador she wasn't thinking about Jesus:
The power of the cross—the idea that suffering for others can lead to new life—was for me then, as it was for the unbelievers Saint Paul wrote about, and remains for rationalists today, "folly."
While she was in El Salvador, Miles became pregnant. She and the father, Bob, another journalist, settled in San Francisco, where their daughter Katie was born. Here Miles's life took on a new domesticity, rooted in one place. Bob, "who had come out as a gay man," lived nearby. And Miles and Katie—"a luminously happy, talkative child"—began to share their home with Martha, an editor with whom Miles had fallen in love. As she recounts in Take This Bread:
July 2010, Vol. 54, No. 7
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