Take This Bread by Sara Miles

For the last ten years our church has met each Sunday around a meal. There is something that happens to a community that comes together around a meal, brought together by a mutual hunger, invited by Jesus, and open to all. We have had a lot of interesting characters eat with us over the last ten years and I'd love to write about our experiences one day, but I'm sure I wouldn't be able to express the raw emotion, passion and richness that Sara Miles brings to this fascinating memoir. You can smell it and taste it.

Raised as an atheist opposed to Christianity, Sara Miles describes how she wanders into a church and takes communion, then something happens to her that is 'outrageous and terrifying'. She found that 'God, named "Christ" or "Jesus", was real, and in my mouth'. What follows is frankly a riveting, disturbing and inspiring adventure about how a lesbian atheist journalist ended up finding Jesus in the giving and receiving of food, both in the Episcopal rites of communion, and in the growth of her food pantry serving hundreds of needy people in San Francisco.

One of the major themes of the book is the inclusivity of the way she experiences communion, and in how the food pantry runs, modelled on Jesus' radical eating habits described in the gospels. I resonated with how often she finds Jesus not in the rituals of church but in the simple encounter of eating with those who you feel uncomfortable with and who are different to you. This 'radical hospitality' opens Jesus' table to all, and their food pantry is also open to all with no ID required.

I loved how she described the way in which some of the people who came for food began to volunteer to help, and in doing so found meaning and identity. People want more than food: 'they wanted, in fact, church: not the kind where you sit obediently and listen to someone tell you how to behave but the kind where you discover responsibility, purpose, meaning. They wanted a church where they could bring their sorrows, their gifts, their entire messy lives: where they could find community'. Amen to that Sara!

The food pantry looks more and more like the kind of place Jesus would have hung out - hungry, broken people from all different countries, coming together around food, those mentally ill, gang members, addicts, transsexuals and many more, finding community, love and healing in all sorts of ways. God at work in the mess and incompleteness of life.

I loved how she described a conversation that concluded with the idea that 'food and healing go together'. This is so true in my own experience, but most obviously from Jesus' meals in the gospels. Jesus offers a radically inclusive meal invitation, but amidst the trouble and controversy that ensued, healing and miracles and transformation are found.

If you like your Christianity in nice neat packages please don't read this book. But if you enjoy being challenged, don't mind the odd 'F' word and enjoy a great story well told, go for it.