Take This Bread by Sara Miles

Author:Sara Miles [Miles, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49161-9
Publisher: BALLANTINE BOOKS
Published: 2007-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

When church people referred to the pantry as a “ministry,” I'd get antsy: The term still sounded cloyingly Christian to me. But Steve, who was considering going to seminary to become a priest, thought it was great. “Hey,” said Steve, “look, it's the biggest service St. Gregory's has each week. It's a church. You figured out how the liturgy should go, and you lead it every week. You recruit and train all these volunteers. You do pastoral care, you do administration, you have to deal with the rest of the staff and the building and raising money and take crazy phone calls from your congregants at home. Then there's the spiritual shit on top of it all.” He laughed. “You're basically half-time clergy.”

“Unpaid,” I pointed out.

“Unpaid,” he agreed. “I think the term in the church for that is nonstipendiary. Sounds more official.”

I didn't want to be official: I hadn't been in a classroom since high school, I was used to moving on the edges of institutions, and I was lousy at obedience. Just as with my “unauthorized” laying on of hands, I intended to keep doing the service of the food pantry unless someone forbade it: I couldn't see stopping just to get professionally licensed.

Steve was right, though: We were serving more people at the pantry on Fridays now than at all the Sunday services combined. We had more volunteers. We even had our own vestments: I'd bought some red aprons, printed with bright yellow letters. “St. Gregory's Food Pantry,” they said. “Peace on Earth, and Food for All.” Passing the leftover bread and wine around during coffee hour after church on Sundays—“More Jesus?” I'd ask politely—I'd mention that the Eucharist continued on Fridays. “Same Table,” I'd say. “Come feed and be fed.”

Donald Schell still looked slightly alarmed when he walked in on Fridays and saw the compost bin next to his altar, the unkempt strangers with keys to his building, and the messy piles of flattened cardboard boxes by the baptismal font. But he made the leap: The pantry was church. “Come here,” he said, at the close of one day. He beckoned me into the sacristy, where the parish register, which recorded all services, was kept in a huge, old-fashioned book. “Write down the number of people who come each Friday,” the priest instructed me. “And the names of all the servers.”

But it was the unofficial nature of the pantry that I really loved, nothing that could be written down in a ledger: the giddy sense that we were being propelled forward, almost too fast to be afraid, by a force as irresistible as the one recounted in Matthew's Gospel. 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.

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