Holy communion knocked me upside down and forced me to deal with the impossible reality of God. Then, as conversion continued, relentlessly challenging my assumptions about religion and politics and meaning, God forced me to deal with all kinds of other people. In large ways and small, I wrestled with Christianity; its grand promises and its petty demands, its temptations and hypocrisies and promises, its ugly history and often insufferable adherents. Faith for me didn’t provide a set of easy answers or certainties It raised more questions than I was ever comfortable with. The bits of my past- family, work, war, love – came apart as I stumbled into church, then reassembled, though the works communion inspired me to do, into a new life centered on feeding strangers: food and bodies, transformed. I wound up not in what church people like to call “a community of believers” – which tends to be code of “a like-minded club” – but in something huger and wilder than I had ever expected: the suffering, fractious, and unboundaried body of Christ.

-Sara Miles
Take This Bread

• Light a candle to remember Christ’s presence with you.
• Invite yourself to remember the first communion you can remember.
• What specific things do you remember about experience of communion?
• What hunger was satisfied?
• What hunger was stirred?
• What freedom did you experience?
• What tension did you notice?
• Remember a recent experience of communion.
• What is similar and what has changed?
• Give thanks to God for hunger, for being fed, and for the new things you received today.
• Share as you feel led in the reply box below.