Our neighbors on 79th Street are offering a three-week discussion of Take this Bread: A Radical Conversion by Sara Miles. We are invited to join them on October 10 and 17 in the Parish Center at 406 East 80th St, and then on October 24 in the church (79th Street and 1st Avenue), when the author Sara Miles will be in person.

Early one morning, for no earthly reason, Sara Miles, raised an atheist, wandered into a church [St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church] received communion, and found herself transformed–embracing a faith she’d once scorned. A lesbian left-wing journalist who’d covered revolutions around the world, Miles didn’t discover a religion that was about angels or good behavior or piety; her faith centered on real hunger, real food, and real bodies. Before long, she turned the bread she ate at communion into tons of groceries, piled on the church’s altar to be given away. Within a few years, she and the people she served had started nearly a dozen food pantries in the poorest parts of their city.

Take This Bread is rich with real-life Dickensian characters–church ladies, millionaires, schizophrenics, bishops, and thieves–all blown into Miles’s life by the relentless force of her newfound calling. Here, in this achingly beautiful, passionate book, is the living communion of Christ.