Take this Bread

Yesterday I walked out into our Kitchen and proclaimed that everyone must read this book: Sara Miles 'Take this Bread'.

I haven't found myself quite so taken with a book in a long while. I keep having to stop and catch my breath to try and take it all in.

It is fascinating, challenging, offensive, affirming, confusing and profound all at once. And all wrapped up in some achingly beautiful prose.

Loving every minute.

A taste:

'I still can't explain my first communion. It made no sense. I was in tears and physically unbalanced: I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over, painlessly, from behind. The disconnect between what I thought was happening - I was eating a piece of bread; what I heard someone else say was happeing - the piece of bread was the "body" of "Christ," a patently untrue or at best metaphorical statement; and what I knew was happening - God, named "Christ" or "Jesus" was real, and in my mouth - utterly short-circuited my ability to do anything but cry. All the way home, shocked, I scrambled for explanations. Maybe I was hypersuggestible, and being surrounded by believers had been enough to push me, momentarily, into accepting their superstitions...Yet that impossible word Jesus, lodged in me like a crumb. I said it over and over to myself, as if repetition would help me understand. I had no idea what it meant; I didn't know what to do with it. But it was realer than any thought of mine, or even any subjective emotion: It was as real as the actual taste of the bread and the wine. And the word was indisputably in my body now, as if I'd swallowed a radioactive pellet that would outlive my own flesh.'