In Feasting on Hope, author Hannah Miller King, a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, shares her story of childhood trauma within the framework of her experience of finding God’s gift of hope while participating in the Lord’s Supper, first as a young adult congregant receiving Communion, and later in her ministry serving at the Communion Table.
As a young child, Miller King enjoyed the stability of family and friends around the kitchen table. She writes, “There was a safety in that first community around the table, a permission to become myself through trial and error and the input of wise guides. I wasn’t perfect or the center of things, but I belonged.”
When Miller King was 11 years old, her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As her parents pursued medical options to try to save his life, Miller King and her five siblings were split up and taken into supportive people’s homes for weeks at a time, then moved to other families. In that period, Miller King was “haunted by an aching sadness” that she couldn’t explain or understand. But she knew she “wasn’t home and that nothing was the same as it was before. At the borrowed tables of friends and relatives, I was always a partial outsider.” Three years after his initial diagnosis, Miller King's father died.
After her father’s death, Miller King and her family continued to face displacement, depending on the resources of their Christian community to survive.
When Miller King entered seminary, she began to take weekly Communion at a church she attended, a practice that slowly, but radically, changed her. She writes, “In the practice of Communion, I was invited to rehearse bodily what I believed doctrinally. By grace, we are grafted into God’s family. I knew this intellectually, but was undone by the tangible, liturgical expression of Christ’s profound welcome. Week after week as I came to the Table—his Table—he confronted my fear of abandonment, my feelings of displacement, my shame. And in exchange he offered me himself. Slowly, I found a new sense of belonging at this Table.”
Feasting on Hope—part memoir, part spiritual reflection and guide—is a valuable resource for Christians who want to grow in understanding the hope and belonging Jesus offers his children as they come to his Table. The book, which concludes with questions for reflection and discussion, is suitable for individual or small group study. (IVP Formatio)