In her book ’Take this bread’, Sara Miles reflects on her experience of wandering into a church and receiving communion. She wandered into the church of St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco one early, cloudy morning when she was forty-six years old: ‘I ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans - except that up until that moment I’d led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything’.

Sara Miles describes the way in which this mysterious sacrament transformed her life. In her own words ‘’an unlikely convert; a blue-state, secular intellectual; a lesbian; a left-wing journalist with a habit of skepticism’, the experience completely changed the way in which she related to others. The eucharist nourished and fed her. It gave her the confidence to start a food pantry and give away tonnes of fruit and vegetables and cereal around the same altar where she had first received the body of Christ.

Her story is a remarkable testimony. She describes her conversion as ‘unexpected and terribly inconvenient’  - and discovered in the eucharist a force for connection, for healing, for love …. communion. 

This Sunday a number of the younger members of our community at St Mary’s will receive communion for the first time. This is a significant moment for them and for their families. Please remember them in your prayers - but also remember that when we become honoured guests at Christ’s table, when we 'take this bread’, we too can be transformed.