The food pantry is funded entirely by (mostly very small) donations - not by the church, or by government. There’s often a moment when I’m hanging out with a group of Christians –– usually liberal Christians, the kind who care about global warming and inclusive language –– and I see them glance at me as if I’m a total freak.
I embarrassed people by talking too much about Jesus. It’s crazy that Jesus would trust us, this bunch of cowards and clowns, to do his work, but I believe we’ve been breathed upon, and given the power to act as if we are, in fact, the real body of Christ. In Jesus Freak I continue to take Jesus’s charge to his disciples literally: heal, forgive, raise the dead. Now we serve more than 600 people a week. I wrote about the ways that communion inspired me to set up a food pantry in the middle of the sanctuary, around that same altar, giving away groceries to anyone who showed up. I wandered into a church one morning, was offered communion, and understood two things at the same time: I was eating a real chunk of bread, and God was alive, and in my mouth. I love the heat, the hilarity, the showing-off and camaraderie, the wild invention, the physicality. I worked for years as a line cook in restaurant kitchens. My first book, Take This Bread, was an account of my completely unexpected mid-life conversion - I’d been an atheist and a journalist, with no religious upbringing whatsoever. Within a few years, the loaves had multiplied, and she and the people she served had started nearly a dozen more pantries.My new book, Jesus Freak, tells the stories of ordinary people who take up Jesus’s work in the world -feeding, healing, and raising the dead. The first food pantry she established provided hundreds of poor, elderly, sick, deranged, and marginalized people with lifesaving food and a sense of belonging. Before long, she turned the bread she ate at communion into tons of groceries, piled on the church's altar to be given away. She was certainly not the kind of person the government had in mind to run a "faith-based charity." Religion for her was not about angels or good behavior or piety it was about real hunger, real food, and real bodies. "I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian," she writes, "or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut." But she ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine, and found herself radically transformed.Ī lesbian left-wing journalist who covered revolutions around the world, Miles was not the woman her friends expected to see suddenly praising Jesus. Then early one winter morning, for no earthly reason, she wandered into a church.
Raised as an atheist, Sara Miles lived an enthusiastically secular life as a restaurant cook and a writer.
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