An atheist finds God through what she considers to be the essential idea behind the Christian act of communion: feeding the hungry. Really interesting story, if perhaps overlong and a bit humble-braggy at times. What struck me most was her reluctance to tell her family and non-Christian friends about her conversion, and when she finally did, how they pushed back and asked how she could possibly believe in a religion that [insert atrocity here]. By the end of the book it is a question she has to resolve for herself, and comes up with this for an answer: "Christianity wasn't an argument I could win, or even resolve. It wasn't a thesis. It was a mystery that I was finally willing to swallow." Which is a pretty decent answer. ( )

In lieu of not judging my neighbor or myself, I will judge first my neighbor, and then myself; but keep in mind, it’s all nonsense; it’s all merely formal.

It is instructive I guess to learn why people oppose certain things, like gay marriage; I didn’t strictly read this book to learn about them, but naturally it comes up because Sara is queer (and charitable). People say it’s ultimately about “whether the Bible is trust-worthy”. At least that’s not a Trump tweet, right. The Bible can “equip you for good works”, as Paul said, and trust is a good thing to have, especially for the trust-worthy. I just wonder how much trust anti-gay people really have, you know. —(I go to church in San Francisco!) —GASP, (the porn! the porn!). Not even. Not even, Hi I’m gay, but Hi I’m from San Francisco!…. As though Jesus were a pagan god, a local god, whose writ doesn’t run in San Francisco. Someone says they’re from San Francisco, don’t even talk to him—Don’t let the wizard speak!—but turn around and spit over your left shoulder three times, right.

But I also have issues with trust, at times.

I’m certainly aware that I have fears, which I guess is the opposite of trust. I mean, sometimes it’s okay. I certainly don’t fear being unimportant, or even, sometimes being imperfect. When I was eating with my brother and his family for Christmas, we went to a place that supposedly had that one vegetarian option, but it didn’t, it turns out you had to order something non-vegetarian and then specify for them to hold the meat, which I did, and then I got pasta with chicken anyway. It was fine. What’s saving the environment got to do with Christmas, absolutely nothin’, nuh. Of course, intellectually, you know, they probably just threw out the chicken meal, (hopefully some dishwasher ate it, but maybe not), and therefore my brothers’ dollars probably paid for another chicken’s death because of my meal, just as surely as if I had put the flesh in my mouth. But, what are you gonna do. Christmas is the festival of sin, and I’m just some HomeGoods cashier, not someone who designs holidays, right. It’s not important what I think.

But then—and I won’t go into this fully, because people who are outsiders to the life in my head won’t understand; you’ll just think I’m a nut, because I got very unconscious—in my head I dealt very poorly with being told, I don’t know, implicitly this and that, Stop making noise stop dragging me down, don’t be a burden. It triggered my fear of abandonment and sin, you know—lots of childhood regression going on. (I can kinda see it happening with my nephew, too. “You’re not a good little boy if you don’t sit still! If you’re not a good little boy you’ll be punished like the slaves!”, but nobody is seriously concerned with, Look At Me, I’m Important, because that’s what his parents do. They would just rather he say, Look at YOU; YOU are important!! Lol 😆…. And there was certainly a time when I thought I was important, you know; maybe there’s a vestige of that in not wanting to be called bad, you know. “But I love you! YOU are important!” —Please. Get a better job; then you can flatter me.)

Anyway…. I don’t know, it’s like, Go to the dentist! Find your own way to fry there! Sheesh! [I wrote, Go there, but fry kinda says it lol.] And then I’m like, I’m being abandoned; I’m becoming sin…. And certainly not a lot of trust going on inside me.

Maybe I too think that Jesus is limited by time or place, like he takes the bad days off, you know. 🥺

…. Of course, she mostly talks about the poor, and maybe a bit about doubt or unconventional liturgy, but not as much about queer people, the way her friend the famous Rachel does—who I in turn picked up once upon a time thinking I was going to get girl pastors stories, not thinking that some her peeps might be queer and not worried about all the things I was, you know.

And I guess I’m like that, too. I’m diagnosed, but I wouldn’t talk about mental health sociology and stigma if you paid me. (I’m an Aquarius; there are a lot of things you couldn’t pay me to do, though I’m happy to do anonymous random person work.) I don’t know whether that—ally-ship over self/own community promotion/advocacy—is culture is some kind of attainment, so, yeah; I dunno 🤷.

…. Personally I sometimes, if not always, feel a comfort with the churchy old guard, (even if maybe I don’t represent the whole demographic they need to win, or whatever), even if I do also want them to change. Sara talks about Jesus not “caring” about “church”. Some people, when Jesus starts to sound too much like a troublemaker, start looking for Paul. “I sure hope you guys go to church,” said Paul. But that apostle himself, didn’t, know what it was like to have a cushy Victorian colonial or Victorian British job—quiet years of scholarship, you know. Sometimes they would beat him up and leave him for dead. Maybe Paul would be more at home in the ghetto, in the housing projects, that Sara spent time in, right. Right on the edge of everything greater, and a punch in the mouth.

…. I mean, I guess that’s the problem I had with that conservative-Anglicans-of-North-America-breakaways girl—it’s like, Make your bed, and say your prayers for your parents and the czar, and don’t fuss over things, unless it’s fussing over tea time; and it’s like, it’s not that that has been completely wrong for me, nor even that it isn’t a sort of mixed blessing, but it is kinda crazy, and many Episcopalians aren’t so different from ACNAs, you know.

…. I guess that’s what Sidney meant in the last part of his memoir, although I confess I couldn’t understand it, really—being the GI Generation, the USA myth, and the Santa Claus myth, it built us up in our youth, at least in a way, but it was also a lie, at least in part…. So now, what do we tell our children?

…. It’s big of her to risk inadvertently getting dumped by her family—“you’re not normal like us anymore! You’re not like all the other Californians!” (although CA is great, lol—West Covina! California! (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”)—even though as a queer woman she barely even had a home life of her own to begin with. At the very least, it was much more assaulted to begin with than a straight person’s, as such. So it’s big to maybe give that up. “Baby you’re bigger, than me.” (“Backstreet Boys”—LOLZ).

…. But, you know….

Ie, just one more thing:

(review ends)

…. After-note: I used to be a Christian, used to be very loyal: used to think that if I were just a good contemporary liturgical Protestant and went to a Lib Prot church with liturgy, I would be free of all the dross clinging to Christianity, though I was never free from anger during that period, anger, half-suppressed and denied, about what the church is. But at least some of that awakening to my actual content came from books, in particular this one, by Christians; Sara realized that there’s nothing really contemporary in most of today’s liturgical churches, any more than in the evangelical ones. The evangelicals tend to be flagrant in their disrespect, but plenty of proper lit Prots don’t really give a damn, you know. I don’t know. It’s hard to describe. Like, you’re loyal, so you read about the ‘good people’ in your group, and you find out they’re discontent with, I don’t know, just passive dross and inertia and just mouthing the words, and how they don’t want to follow their fathers into error; and it’s like: Shit. It’s nothing like that here. That’s nothing like where I go to church…. I guess that’s why there are censors, you know—lol. But censor one book, you know: then you’d have to censor all of them, because on some level I knew, just by showing up and subliminally being unhappy there, that it didn’t work as advertised, you know. And then it’s like, “and the church ladies and aristocrats of the breakfast table on both sides want me up shut up, don’t want the fight to come out into the open”—and it’s like, yeah…. Of course they don’t want you to be free, you know.

A powerful look at what it means to accept the body of Christ in our churches and in our lives. ( )

Couldn't finish this. I think that everyone's spiritual journey has unique elements, but sometimes people maybe overgeneralize their experience into everyone's life lessons.

Reading this book has inspired me to be more attentive to cooking. I have not appreciated, I think, the gift that cooking is to those who eat.
The whole text here is a generous offering of food. Here's a quote:

I didn't believe in dragging souls into some special club of the saved.
"I mean," I'd told Steve once, exasperated after listening to Donald talk about institutional growth and how to attract new members with our innovative liturgy, "the point of church isn't to get people to come church."
"No?" said Steve, cocking an eyebrow. "What is it?"
It seemed obvious to me. "To feed them, so they can go out and, you know, be Jesus."
I suddenly was abashed. "I mean, I don't know, I'm new, that sounds pretentious..." My voice trailed off. But I meant it. YOU HAVE BEEN GREATLY LOVED, said a piece of the Gospel that had stuck with me. GO AND DO LIKEWISE. That seemed pretty damn clear.

(p.265-66 in paperback edition.)

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