Here she tells how the seeds of her conversion were sown, and what her life has been like since she took that bread: as a lesbian left-wing journalist, religion for her was not about angels or good behavior or piety. The sacrament of communion has sustained Miles ever since, in a faith she'd scorned, in work she'd never imagined. "I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian," she writes, "or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut." But she ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine, and found herself radically transformed. Then early one morning, for no earthly reason, she wandered into a church. The church I'd unknowingly landed in turned out to be a scandal, a dirty joke at airport restaurants, a sign-in fact, thank God, a sure bet-that I was going to eat with sinners.Raised as an atheist, Sara Miles lived an enthusiastically secular life.
It may have been the “San Francisco,” I realized later, but the city's name was a reasonable stand-in, by that point, for everything conservative Christians had come to hate about the Episcopal Church as a whole: homosexuality wealth feminism and morally relativist, decadent, rudderless liberalism. “Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, in San Francisco,” I said, as her face rearranged itself, froze, and closed. I showed her the little volume of psalms that I'd borrowed from Rick Fabian. I smiled back, and we exchanged small talk about the weather and flight delays, and then she asked me what I was reading. She had short blond hair and a cross of her own, and was wearing some kind of sexless denim jumper that reeked of piety. A woman-perhaps noticing the silver crucifix I had recently and self-consciously started to wear around my neck-caught my eye and smiled as she took the stool next to me. Gregory's, I found myself at a restaurant counter in the Denver airport, waiting for a flight home from a reporting trip. Just a few months after I began going to St. But if I had imagined that, initiated as a Christian, I was going to achieve some kind of easy bond with other believers, that fantasy was soon shot. “Before I knew anything about church, I'd assumed that most Christians spoke the same language, shared a sense of fellowship, and beyond minor differences had a faith in common that could transcend political boundaries.
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