Sara Miles Quotes & Sayings

Heavenly comfort, rather, is truth, which blows away human fantasies that we can live forever, control everything, or fake our lives before God. — Sara Miles

In big ways and small, I knew exactly how selfish a war could make me, and I saw all around me how fear and need drove other people to terrible betrayals. Yet over and over, I also saw how war created a community, a people, and how that community was nourished by gestures of sharing. It was sharing that didn't depend on personal intimacy, and a community that didn't depend on everyone's being friends; it foreshadowed what I would come to understand as church, at its best. — Sara Miles

Thank God for Jesus. Because, you know, he was here like us, so he knows how hard it is to be a person. He must have a sense of humor about us. — Sara Miles

Christians could agree or argue about God as much as we wanted, but it was all essentially chatter. What bound that driver and me together was the obvious thing, so plain and dumb between us we could almost ignore it: the rough wooden pallet of onions that organized our days. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit prisoners. We fed people. — Sara Miles

Conversion isn't, after all, a moment: It's a process, and it keeps happening, with cycles of acceptance and resistance, epiphany and doubt. — Sara Miles

I'm not always able to think about so much loss without bitterness and anger. I don't know if I'll ever be capable of loving my enemies; I'm not always capable of forgiving myself. — Sara Miles

What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, — Sara Miles

What happened once I started distributing communion was the truly disturbing, dreadful realization about Christianity: You can't be a Christian by yourself. — Sara Miles

sufferings and loveliness were imagined, not incarnate in a specific body. But as I got to know them, I started to see more clearly how the people who came to the pantry were like me: messed up, often prickly or difficult, yearning for friendship. I saw how they were hungry, the way I was. And then, I had a glimpse of them being like Jesus again: as God, made flesh and blood. — Sara Miles

The Bible is not a set of instructions that can give us simple answers," wrote Webber, "nor a text with which to prove points ... . The guidance the Bible gives was provided for a society very different from ours ... and any set of words is open to different interpretations. — Sara Miles

The endless fights among the faithful had prompted Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, to write that "unity is a gospel imperative when we recognize that it opens us to change, to conversion: when we realize how our life with Christ is somehow bound up with our willingness to abide with those we think are sinful, and those we think are stupid. — Sara Miles

Respectable Protestant denominations retreated inside...leaving...unaffiliated madwomen to evangelize alfresco... — Sara Miles

I wanted to stand on the kind of holy ground that wasn't curated by church professionals, where a burning bush could blaze forth in defiance of safety regulations and outside of regular office hours. — Sara Miles

The point of church isn't to get people to come to church." "No?" said Steve, cocking an eyebrow. "What is it?" It seemed obvious to me. "to feed them, so they can go out and, you know, be Jesus." Take this Bread, A Radical Conversion by Sara Miles — Sara Miles

There's no way to be a Christian at home by yourself. — Sara Miles

Imperialism and exploitation," he wrote, "spheres of influence, trade barriers, unequal distribution of the world's goods, starvation in the midst of plenty, slums with gold coasts next door, poverty supporting luxury: These are marks of an unChristian world. — Sara Miles

Charity had always slightly creeped me out: There was nothing quite as condescending as the phrase "helping the less fortunate" rolling off the tongue of a white professional, as if poverty were a matter of luck instead of the result of a political system. — Sara Miles

In both roles, as journalist and as organizer, I'd learn that it's possible to fall in love with a revolution - then doubt it, fight with it, lose faith in it, and return with a sense of humor and a harder, lasting love. I would have to learn the same thing about church when I was much older, and it would be no easier. — Sara Miles

It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God's. — Sara Miles

Just like the strangers who'd fed me in El Salvador or South Africa, I was going to have to see and understand the hunger of other, different men and women, and make a gesture of welcome, and eat with them. And just as I hadn't "deserved" any of what had been given to me - the fish, the biscuits, the tea so abundantly poured out back in those years - I didn't deserve communion myself now. I wasn't getting it because I was good. I wasn't getting it because I was special. I certainly didn't get to pick who else was good enough, holy enough, deserving enough, to receive it. It wasn't a private meal. The bread on that Table had to be shared with everyone in order for me to really taste it. — Sara Miles

Faith, for me, isn't an argument, a catechism, a philosophical "proof." It is instead a lens, a way of experiencing life, and a willingness to act. — Sara Miles

He's the thrilling, scary Boyfriend who's going to dare you to do things you'd never dreamed of, shower you with unreasonable presents, and show up uninvited at the most embarrassing times. Then he's going to stick with you, refusing to take the hint when you don't answer his calls. — Sara Miles

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. That love meant giving yourself away, embracing outsiders as family, emptying yourself to feed and live for others. The stories illuminated the holiness located in mortal human bodies, and the promise that people could see God by cherishing all those different bodies the way God did. They spoke of a communion so much vaster than any church could contain: one I had sensed all my life could be expressed in the sharing of food, particularly with strangers. — Sara Miles

The entire contradictory package of Christianity was present in the Eucharist. A sign of unconditional acceptance and forgiveness, it was doled out and rationed to insiders; a sign of unity, it divided people; a sign of the most common and ordinary human reality, it was rarefied and theorized nearly to death. — Sara Miles

I read the story about the loaves and fishes and thought about Jesus gazing at the hungry crowd, saying to his anxious, doubting, screwed-up followers: "You give them something to eat." So we did. — Sara Miles

Conversion was turning out to be quite far from the greeting-card moment promised by televangelists, when Jesus steps into your life, personally saves you, and becomes your lucky charm forever. Instead, it was socially and politically awkward, as well as profoundly confusing. I wasn't struck with any sudden conviction that I now understood the "truth." If anything, I was just crabbier, lonelier, and more destabilized. — Sara Miles

The faith I was finding was jagged and more difficult. It wasn't about abstract theological debates: Does God exist? Are sin and salvation predestined? Or even about political/ideological ones: Is capital punishment a sin? Is there a scriptural foundation for accepting homosexuality? It was about action. Taste and see, the Bible said, and I did. — Sara Miles

In a lonely and commercial world, sanctuaries still matter... (they) continue to speak to the deep desire for a set-apart place to rest and pray. — Sara Miles

I'd gone to Central America because I didn't think politics was simply a matter of opinion. It wasn't about having the right "line," having an ideologically pure analysis. It had to be incarnate. And now I was seeing the same thing with faith. It couldn't be about wrangling over the Bible to find justification for your convictions. Like politics, faith had to be about action. — Sara Miles

On a volunteer's shoulders to see Donald break the English muffin. I understood why Christians imagined the kingdom of heaven as a feast: a banquet where nobody was excluded, where the weakest and most broken, the worst sinners and outcasts, were honored guests who welcomed one another in peace and shared their food. "Let this broken bread and shared wine be a foretaste of your kingdom," we sang, "and bring us finally to your heavenly Table, where no one is left behind, and we will join with saints and angels at the feast you have prepared from the beginning. — Sara Miles

I was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for righteousness. I found it at the eternal and material core of Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine, poured out freely, shared by all. — Sara Miles

While the classic conversion story involves desperation, hitting bottom, and a plea for help, I think now that it was gratitude, as well as the suffering I'd seen, that made room for me to open my heart to something new. — Sara Miles

You get to a point where you just have to give up,"...she deeply understood the "relief" of finding yourself to be small in the face of mystery. — Sara Miles

Feed my sheep, feed my sheep," I repeated. "He didn't say, 'Feed my sheep after you check their ID. — Sara Miles

I began to understand why so many people chose to be "born-again" and follow strict rules that would tell them what to do, once and for all. It was tempting to rely on a formula - "accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior," for example - that became itself a form of idolatry and kept you from experiencing God in your flesh, in the complicated flesh of others. It was tempting to proclaim yourself "saved" and go back to sleep. — Sara Miles

There's a hunger beyond food that's expressed in food, and that's why feeding is always a kind of miracle. — Sara Miles

Repentance means turning toward other human beings, our own flesh and blood, whenever they're oppressed, hungry, or imprisoned; it means acting with compassion instead of indifference. — Sara Miles