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Author: Bob Francis
Ever since college, I’ve been a bit of a reluctant Christian. Full of questions and doubts, I’ve forged a truce of sorts with faith. At moments faithful, at moments faith-less, I’ve felt my way forward, moment by moment.
At different times over the years, I’ve been helped by the stories of other pilgrims on the journey. In my mid-20s, I was carried forward by the conversion story of Thomas Merton, the Columbia University academic turned Trappist monk. I resonated with Merton because he didn’t find God in a flash of lightning or clap of thunder, but quietly… discretely… subtlety…. across a series of moments over years.
I think the spiritual memoir for my 30s so far is Take This Bread by Sara Miles. A lesbian, secular left-wing journalist, Sara – who knew one Christian – walked into a church one morning – for no earthly reason – and found meaning at the communion table.
For someone who saw Christianity as a “cultural jihad… with its absolutist thunderings about school prayer and homosexuality,” imagine her surprise to find tears on her cheeks among strangers in the rotunda of St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church. A most unlikely convert, she was caught off guard by God.
As she writes, “All of it pointed to a force stronger than the anxious formulas of religion: a radically inclusive love that accompanied people in the most ordinary of actions – eating, drinking, walking – and stayed with them, through fear, even past death.”
Skeptic or believer, there’s something for everyone in Sara’s story. Take this bread.
These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages
