City of God

January 20, 2014
“You are dust and to dust you shall return.” One wouldn’t think a book about death would be so vibrant, but Miles (Take This Bread) is able to interweave characters and portraits of her city of God, San Francisco, to bring her theology and practice of Ash Wednesday liturgy to life on the streets. Miles is herself a character, a woman who wrestles with her spirituality as a recovering reporter sympathetic to a plurality of religious movements beyond Protestant Christianity. She introduces other personalities who put flesh and blood on her story of repentance on Ash Wednesday 2012, like an “ancient Mexican bearded gnome-lady” who blesses Miles, or Mr. Claws, the homeless man who sparks her adventure with a visit to a medical clinic, only to disappear. San Francisco’s Mission District is not only the setting but also the protagonist of the book, moving the narrative forward with its urban flavors and faults, influencing Miles’s theology and making “the presence of God most real” for both author and reader. This is a convincing Lenten adventure into a dynamic Christian view of faith in the streets, of repentance and blessing, life and death, in the cracked sidewalks and fractured realities of the city of God. Agent: Greg Daniel, Daniel Literary Group.

December 1, 2013
Account of an unusual urban Ash Wednesday. San Francisco Food Pantry founder and director Miles (Jesus Freak: Feeding Healing Raising the Dead, 2010, etc.) shares her experiences and musings from Ash Wednesday in 2012. A resident of San Francisco's Mission District, the author encounters a level of diversity within a few blocks of her home and church that rivals almost any other urban neighborhood in America. It is within such a setting that she goes about the job of ministering, under the auspices of an Episcopal church, to the larger community. Much of her story is a lead-up to her journey outside the confines of church walls, when she took the ashes of Ash Wednesday out into the neighborhood, offering ashes on the street corners throughout her neighborhood. Despite her anxieties about this very public celebration of liturgy, the event turned out to be a joyous and touching experience. Miles is deeply committed to her urban neighborhood and toward radical involvement in the life of the city. In fact, everywhere she looks, she is reminded of "the movement," a waning countercultural thrust spawning everything from socialist bookstores to gay street patrols. Given the nontraditional backdrop of the Mission, Miles' Episcopal chants and rituals seem out of place and even jarring, yet everywhere she went on this Ash Wednesday, she was met by people eager to partake in the ceremony. Along the way, she introduces colorful characters, both from the fringes of society and from the depths of San Francisco activism. An intriguing read, Miles' account will resonate most with those who live in and love the inner city. Though the author recognizes that religious experiences are global and varied, she is unapologetic in proclaiming, "for me, it's cities that make the presence of God most real." Poignant and passionate look at the city church, inside the walls and out.

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January 1, 2014
Miles, the founder and director of the Food Pantry and director of ministry at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, offers this heartfelt memoir as homage to her faith community. But it is also a testament to the concept of faith itself as Miles, an atheist when she first came to St. Gregory's, accepts communion for the first time, ironically in the place with the lowest rates of church attendance of any major U.S. city. She began discovering faith in San Francisco's Potrero Hill and Mission neighborhoods, especially through the Ash Wednesday liturgies with their recognition, she writes, of common mortality and the call for repentance and change. Even as mainline Protestant congregations decline, she notes there is a growing network of unhoused congregations that meet outdoors to serve people living on the streets. Their stories are a big part of this, as is her discussion of the importance of finding the common good, a notion that is under siege as the Mission becomes more gentrified. An informative, luminous memoir of faith and community.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)