What Are You Working On?
Writers on their works in progress

Sara Miles

journalist and activist

Sara Miles (website) is a writer and editor living in San Francisco. She's the author of How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley (Farrar Straus Giroux) and an editor of Opposite Sex (NYU Press). With Jan Heller Levi, she is the co-editor of Directed by Desire: the Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon). Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, OUT, the Progressive, La Jornada, Salon, and more; she's an editor for the Web site of FRONTLINE/World. She's written extensively on military affairs, politics and culture.

I'm currently working on a book for Random House about communion, with the working title Take this Bread: How a Secular Intellectual Wound Up Praising Jesus and Feeding the Poor.

 
What led you to this project?

A completely unexpected conversion to Christianity, and my subsequent work organizing food pantries to feed thousands of hungry people.

 
What are you trying to do with this project that you haven't done before? What challenges are you overcoming?

I'm not used to writing about myself, except as a device: this book has way less conventional reporting than anything I've worked on before. It makes me a bit nervous to be such a central character in the story.

 
What has been rewarding about this particular project?

The opportunity to talk directly about things that matter to me: flesh, blood, eating and bodies. This book explores my own history as a restaurant cook, war correspondent, and unlikely Christian convert.

One day five years ago, when I was forty-six, I walked into my neighborhood church, ate a piece of bread, had a sip of wine. A routine Sunday-morning activity for tens of millions of Americans--except that up until that moment I had led a thoroughly secular life. This was my first communion. It changed everything for me. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer, but literal food--indeed, the bread of life. Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me to a faith I'd scorned and work I'd never imagined. Suddenly religion was not abstract, but about feeding and being fed. In that shocking moment of communion, suddenly filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of another's body, I learned what I was truly meant to do with my life: feed people.

And so I did, starting up food pantries all over my city to provide hundreds and hundreds of hungry families with free groceries each week. It didn't turn out to be as simple as talking kindly to poor folks and handing them the occasional sandwich from a sanctified distance. I had to trudge in the rain through housing projects, sit on the curb wiping the runny nose of a psychotic man, take the firing pin out of a battered woman's .375 Magnum, then stick the gun in a cookie tin in the trunk of my car. I had to learn about the great American scandal of the politics of food, the economy of hunger, and the rules of money. I met thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters and bishops, all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people, widening what I thought of as my "community" in ways that were exhilarating, confusing, often scary.

This book is a personal story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient conversion, told by a very unlikely Christian: a secular intellectual, a blue-state lesbian, a left-wing reporter with an internationalist past. I'm not the person my journalism colleagues ever expected to see smiling at street-corner evangelists. I'm certainly not the person that George Bush had in mind to be running a "faith-based charity." I never imagined, myself, that I could wind up preaching the Word of God and serving communion to a hymn-singing flock.

But Take This Bread is not solely the spiritual memoir of one atheist turned believer. In a moment when right-wing American Christianity is ascendant, when religion is rife with fundamentalism and ideological crusades, this is a political story as well: the account of a radical faith centered on action. It's not about angels, or going to church, or trying to be "good" in a pious, idealized way. It's not about proclaiming a religious doctrine--whether lofty liberal sentiments or conservative "moral values." This book is about what I found at the universal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine. This book is about real food, and real hunger. It tells how I learned to turn holy communion into groceries, to take in strangers and feed them week after week. It's about hungering and thirsting, as the prophet said, for righteousness.

If the current political moment teaches us anything about our common life, it's that religion matters--for better and for worse. At a time when Christianity in America has come to suggest self-righteousness, Republicanism, a belief in gun ownership and opposition to stem-cell research, it's crucial to understand what faith actually means in the lives of people very different from one another. Why does anyone become a Christian? How can anyone reconcile the hateful politics of much contemporary Christianity with the commandments of love? What are the basic ideas of this contested religion, and what good can it possibly do? In this book, I look at the Gospel that moved me, the bread that changed me and the work that saved me, to begin a spiritual and an actual communion across the divides.

 
When do you expect (or hope) to finish, and what happens next?

The manuscript's due in March 2006; it might take up to 18 months after that for it to come out. I plan to do a lot of marketing and publicity on my own.

If you're interested in stories about restaurant life, counterinsurgency warfare, or religion -- or the unlikely combination of any of these -- send me a note, and I'll put you on a list to learn more about my book.

Links

Twenty years after her last assignment in Central America, Sara returned to Nicaragua for FRONTLINE/World.

Sara wrote about Baptism and War in the magazine God's Friends.

Read more about the food pantry Sara founded.

Salon, Oct. 3, 2005: Gays and the Vatican

See more What Are You Working On? interviews.

published 9 Jan 06, updated 9 May 06, on Too Beautiful. email copyright 2006 Mark Pritchard, Bernal Heights, San Francisco