Q&A with Sara Miles

St. Dunstan's: Where did you grow up?
Sara: New York

St. Dunstan's: Can you tell us something about your background as a journalist?
Sara: I've done a lot of different kinds of reporting. I worked as a military reporter during the 1980s, covering wars, mostly in Central America. I did a little bit of reporting from South Africa and the Philippines as well. When I moved back to the United States, I did political reporting. I wrote a book about the Democratic Party in the Silicon Valley and magazine journalism about politics. Writing is my way of understanding the world.

St. Dunstan's: In “Take This Bread”, the subtitle is "a radical conversion." Can you talk a little bit about what happened to change you?
Sara: You know, there's this thing about reporters, they're nosy. I see an open door and people going in and I'm like, oh, what's going on in there? I didn't think of myself as being in a seeking mode, I was certainly not interested in going to church or becoming a Christian. I just thought, I'm taking a walk, let me go in and see what's going on there. And a great deal of it was pleasant and pretty, sort of interesting and boring at the same time.

But what happened at communion was completely, viscerally, shocking and upsetting to me. It was receiving a piece of bread and drinking a sip of wine and understanding that those were actual bread and actual wine -- they weren't magic potions -- but understanding at the same moment that God was alive and in my mouth. And that was not something I wanted to believe in any way. That moment just completely destabilized me: what the hell happened? What have I done?

It isn't as if you have an experience of God and then you're "converted" and everything's fine. There's an ongoing process of conversion, which can sometimes feel more difficult as you go along because you're continually being called to change. It's a continual unfolding.

St. Dunstan's: So you had this conversion that had a food part to it. What was the food part of it to you?
Sara: Because I'm such a slow learner and came so late to Christianity, I took it quite literally. So Jesus saying, "my flesh is real food" seemed literally true to me. And that part when you're baptized and promise to continue in the breaking of bread-- I took that quite literally. And I began to sense that what had happened to me wasn't simply so that I could have an uplifting experience, it was because I needed to continue to feed people the same way that I had been fed.

St. Dunstan's: So that became the food pantry.
Sara: The food pantry is not a social service program. It's not a good deed. It's not a way to help the "less fortunate." It is a Eucharistic community, and it's modeled on the way that we do Eucharist. So the food pantry is run by the people who use it. It offers food to everyone without exception. And it is a place where people come not only to be fed with food, but to participate in having their lives transformed. At this point, the food pantry is 10 years old and we've started 18 others. We're open one day a week, on Fridays,and we serve about 600 families there. The pantry is run entirely by volunteers, and the volunteers are the people who use it.

St. Dunstan's: How is it funded?
Sara: It's funded by small donations. We don't get money from the church. We don't get money from grants. We get money from people.

St. Dunstan's: Can you describe how it's set up? You don't have chairs at St. Gregory's, right?
Sara: We do have chairs. We don't have pews. We have a seating area with about 180 chairs facing each other in choir style. We sit for the Liturgy of the Word, and then we move to the rotunda of the building, which has a round altar in the center. The people gather around it for communion, and then ministers move among the crowd carrying bread and wine; people pass the chalices to each other. So for the first half of the service, people are sitting and the second half, we're standing.

The food pantry takes place around the altar in the rotunda. We set up tables around the altar, in the middle of the sanctuary, so it looks like a farmer's market in heaven. We give away as much as nine tons of food on a Friday: big heaps of carrots and potatoes and onions and bread, and people walk around and choose the food that they need.

St. Dunstan's: Do you have any anecdotes about working in the pantry that you'd like to share? Anybody you met in the course of that work that maybe was just sort of surprising?
Sara: I think everybody's got a story. The food pantry is without a doubt the most diverse church community I've ever seen. It includes Filipino evangelicals and gay skateboarders and black church ladies and head-injured veterans and homeless guys and Japanese students and Latino families and Chinese grandmothers and old Russian men. It's just an incredible mix of people who come, and who volunteer and work together.

What we discover is that people are changed by the experience of giving something delicious away, and giving of themselves. There's a guy who comes here and he says "It's the weirdest thing"--he's in a court-mandated anger management program, he's a tough guy who lived on the streets for a long time--"It's the weirdest thing, Sara. I come here and I don't even want to be mad. I don't even want to fight with anybody. It saves my life to be here." And he just runs around doing as much as he can, lifting things and fixing the dishwasher and giving me hugs. People want to give something: and when they do it changes them.

St. Dunstan's: Do you have a message to the unchurched about Christianity, why Christianity?
Sara: "Come and see." The invitation to experience is always worth making. It's the great gospel invitation--a very different thing from saying "Come and let me tell you what you should believe."

St. Dunstan's: Any thoughts on the Episcopal Church or where it's headed?
Sara: I have deep gratitude that the church was there for me when I came in as a stranger. I see in the church what I see in myself and in the people around me -that we all have a desire to change, and at the same time a desire to have nothing at all change, to stay the same. I think the Episcopal Church has a profound hunger to change, to be made new by God. And it has a profound desire to dig in its heels and stay exactly the way it is. We live in that tension. But the reality is that God is always at work making all things new, and it's our privilege to join in that work.

St. Dunstan's: Can you say something about the title of your latest book, "Jesus Freak" and what it means?
Sara: "Jesus Freak" is a title that can be very embarrassing to Episcopalians. You're not actually supposed to talk about Jesus. It's just sort of a trashy thing to do-- but there you go. I think it's a wonderful thing for people in church to act as if what they do on Sundays is real, that it actually means something. That Jesus isn't an idea or metaphor.

St. Dunstan's: How do you think people find their calling?
Sara: That's a really complicated question. Most of us, if we're lucky, don't get struck by great visions when we're out by ourselves in the desert. We work out a call in community, right? Because usually our call is about relationship with other people and with God-- very few of us are called to be solitary mystics.

So I think about a man I know who is essentially a priest to the people he works with, their shepherd. He's a manager in a kind of boring company, not an ordained priest, but his calling is to care for these people and help them become a people and to care for each other. I know teachers who have that same sense of vocation. One of them told me, "As jobs go, it's a pretty crappy job, to work in a failing city school system. But as a vocation, it's a blessing." Someone else I know, a woman who has four kids, says, "You know, my vocation is my marriage. This is what I'm called to do, which is to make my relationship with my husband into an icon of God's love for others."

St. Dunstan's: Not many people think that way.
Sara: No, but I think people can be helped to think that way. It means taking your life seriously enough.

St. Dunstan's: What does the future hold for you?
Sara: I'm going away in a couple of days to work on another book. I'm very happy to have many, many, many different things that I get to do in a single day.

For more information on Sara, St. Gregory of Nissa, and the food pantry, check out these websites: www.saramiles.net, www.saintgregorys.org, and www.thefootpantry.org.