The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: 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.

charity, less-fortunate, poverty

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.

healing, jesus-freak-feeding, raising-the-dead

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.

conversion, gratitude, suffering

Respectable Protestant denominations retreated inside…leaving…unaffiliated madwomen to evangelize alfresco…

church, city-of-god, faith, jesus

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.

communion, giving, hunger

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

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.

conversion, misconceptions

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

conversion, doubt