Quotes by 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 didnt depend on personal intimacy, and a community that didnt depend on everyones being friends; it foreshadowed what I would come to understand as church, at its best.

Id gone to Central America because I didnt think politics was simply a matter of opinion. It wasnt 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 couldnt be about wrangling over the Bible to find justification for your convictions. Like politics, faith had to be about action.

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.

What happened once I started distributing communion was the truly disturbing, dreadful realization about Christianity: You cant be a Christian by yourself.

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.

To figure out what was really happening behind the clichés, Id learned, meant a practice of looking not at the center but at the edges of things—at the unlikeliest and weakest people, not the most apparently powerful. It meant asking lots of stupid questions, making room for inconvenient facts that didnt fit a schema, and trying to remain honest about what I didnt know.

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 Id seen, that made room for me to open my heart to something new.

Hes the thrilling, scary Boyfriend whos going to dare you to do things youd never dreamed of, shower you with unreasonable presents, and show up uninvited at the most embarrassing times. Then hes going to stick with you, refusing to take the hint when you dont answer his calls.

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.

In both roles, as journalist and as organizer, Id learn that its 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.

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.

He recounted how, at a Jesuit retreat put on by the UCA, the fathers had been talking politics and discussing the issues of democracy in Latin America. Apparently they were sitting around castigating the FMLN for its authoritarianism. Then someone pointed out that in a real democracy, not just the priests but the women who were serving them lunch were going to have something to say about the way things were run, and one of the men blurted out, You cant do that. Theyd make horrible mistakes.Well, said Martín-Baró, thats right: Democracy definitely means that people will make mistakes. And, he added, we should welcome them.

It doesnt 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: Gods.

Faith, for me, isnt an argument, a catechism, a philosophical “proof.” It is instead a lens, a way of experiencing life, and a willingness to act.

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.

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

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 wasnt struck with any sudden conviction that I now understood the truth. If anything, I was just crabbier, lonelier, and more destabilized.

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

Just like the strangers whod 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 hadnt deserved any of what had been given to me—the fish, the biscuits, the tea so abundantly poured out back in those years—I didnt deserve communion myself now. I wasnt getting it because I was good. I wasnt getting it because I was special. I certainly didnt get to pick who else was good enough, holy enough, deserving enough, to receive it. It wasnt a private meal. The bread on that Table had to be shared with everyone in order for me to really taste it.