Take This Bread: Feeding the Good Shepherd's Sheep

Where to start with this book? The Neland ladies met to talk about Take This Bread two months ago, I finished it a month ago, and it's taken me this long to write about it. That's not due to a lack of interest on my part. There is so much in this book that I had to chew on, one piece at a time (no pun intended).

Sara Miles is a left-wing, lesbian journalist who was raised in an intentionally secular home by parents who both grew up as mission kids. Sara is also a Christian, quite possibly a follower of Christ like none you have met before.

Food had always been an important part of her life, including experiences like sharing food with poor revolutionaries in Central America in the 70s and working in a restaurant.

One day, on a whim, Sara entered St. Gregory's Episcopal Church in San Francisco. She sat through the church service, observing, until it came time for communion. St. Gregory's has open communion, and Sara took it. The experience was completely unexpected, and it changed her life.

Sara became a member of St. Gregory's, and soon she organized a food pantry at the church. The pantry began to attract 200 people or more on any given Friday. Her experience led her into a lot of "church" issues, namely that being part of a church congregation means being in communion with people you don't necessarily like, trust, or even want to be associated with. God lives inside of people we don't even like! Sara has a particular love for the different, the broken, the needy; she sees that truly, that's who we all are at the foot of the cross.

Annetta, our leader for the night, shared with us that she has been to St. Gregory's for worship. She reports that it is a lovely place with beautiful music, a wonderful experience. This book club meeting was very well attended, and most people loved the book even if they didn't agree with everything in it.

This meeting reminded me of a discussion we had a few years back after reading Anne Lamott's book Traveling Mercies. We all loved hearing Anne speak at Calvin and reading her book. She's so funny, alive, self-deprecating, and joyous. Then we wondered what would happen if she walked into Neland. She wouldn't be "like us." Same goes for Sara Miles, in some ways. Would we be welcoming? We'd like to think so.

Personally, I have been recognizing several things about my spiritual life and worship experience which this book illuminates. I am craving diversity of community in my church body--diversity of skin color, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, educational status, any and all of it. I am inspired by people who are seeing Christianity as a holistic identity--I don't just think like a Christian, I am Christian in body and soul. Which means that a more physical, incarnational experience is important to me. And so Sara's description of the patchwork nature of the food pantry, as well as the pantry's ability to feed people in both body and soul, really hit home for me. I'm still fumbling my way through trying to figure out what this all means to my day-to-day life.


If you think you might have a dim view of a Sara Miles when she walks into your church, be assured that she may take a dim view of your church as well. Several passages about the kinds of attitudes or arguments or bottlenecks or inertia that hamper ministry hit painfully close to home. If you have been in a traditional church for any length of time, something in this book is likely to offend or hit you wrong. But the basic principle, that Jesus asks us to "feed his sheep," is irrefutable. And Sara, while disdaining doctrine, has a good handle on both Scripture and the life of Christ.

She points out that we should specialize in the "undeserving poor," since that's exactly what we all are. So while you might feel you should take it with a grain of salt, you should definitely Take This Bread.

A Different Look at the Holocaust: Sarah's Key

Julia Jarmond is an American journalist, living in Paris and married to a Frenchman. She is assigned to write about the 60th commemoration of the Vel d'Hiv. Never heard of it? Neither had the Fab 5. Nor many others, according to Sarah's Key, a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay..

On July 16, 1942, French police, on orders from the Gestapo, rounded up 10,000 Jewish people, including children, from the Paris area. They were brought to the Velodrome d'Hiver, an indoor stadium, where they were held for six days while more and more people were packed in. Terrible heat, little food and no facilities made it unbearable. From there they were shipped out to camps, eventually ending at Auschwitz.

Julia learns about this atrocity, but at the same time she learns the story of one of those individuals--Sarah, a young girl who suffered an extra tragedy when she was taken from her home during the roundup. Julia is dealing with personal problems of her own, and Sarah's story makes her look at everything in her life in a new light.

This book does a great job of introducing us to the event itself, to the people who suffered through it, and to both the profound effect on survivors as well as the wish to ignore or forget the event on the part of those who watched it happen.

None of us could stand Julia's husband. If an American had written this, we'd assume she doesn't really like French people, but she is, in fact, French. Having Julia be an American, always on the outside regardless of how long she'd been in France, was a nice parallel to how Jewish people may have experienced the cultures they lived in during World War II.

Some of us found it frustrating that the novel flips back and forth from Sarah's story to Julia's modern-day life. Just when we'd get into one, we'd switch back to the other. However, we wonder if we could stand to read Sarah's story straight through--it's just so sad. Julia's story gave us a way to enter the story, some distraction, and a taste of the way France looked at the event 60 years later. And Julia faces some questions about the value of life in her own world as well as in history.

Whenever we read these stories, we can't help but wonder what we'd do if faced with the decision to put ourselves at risk for someone else. Would we endanger our children to hide someone? We'd like to think we are brave enough, but it's hard to be sure.

Are things like this happening now? There are, to some extent, similarities in what America did with Japanese internment camps and Native American reservations--people of a certain ethnicity taken from their homes and put into prescribed areas with little or no resources. It's possible to look at detention centers for illegal immigrants in the same way--basically, they are imprisoned indefinitely and, according to some reports, treated poorly. It happens where we can't see it, has nothing to do with us, and is therefore not our problem.

Sarah's Key is a good, sad novel that manages to keep the reader while telling an "old" tale and giving a fresh perspective on it. Never forget.