Sara Miles on Communion

Sara Miles, a member of St. Gregory's Episcopal Church in San Francisco, has recently written a book about her experiences as a convert to Christianity, titled Take This Bread. In an interview on the San Francisco Chronicle web site, she makes the following comment:

I think the most important thing for me about St. Gregory's is the practice and the theology of open Communion, which says basically that the altar does not belong to the church. The altar is God's, and everybody is welcome. It is not up to the church to say, "You don't deserve Communion, because you're not baptized or you're gay or you're divorced or you're a child."

The church doesn't own Communion. It's God's meal. That made it possible for me to even take Communion in the first place. It also made it possible for me to look at the church not as a way to divide people from each other, but as a way of joining people together.