c. 1999 Religion News Service

CLEVELAND _ At dawn on a recent Monday, the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas watched the winter sun lift over the frozen Cuyahoga River and began to pray.

She prayed for another day free of addiction. She prayed for the addicts who came to hear her preach downtown Sunday at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. She said the daily ritual prayers of the Episcopal church.

“I took some time for silence,” said Bullitt-Jonas, who teaches prayer at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. “I had met so many here in Cleveland, had so many intense conversations, I just took some time for resting in the mercy of God.”

Gazing west from her eighth-floor window at the Ritz-Carlton, she watched the light strengthen and the shapes emerge as traffic. Silently, she blessed the people in the cars. A Boston native, Bullitt-Jonas knows about making a cold, tense commute into a city.

In her own travels, the warm, open-faced priest has come quite far from the times when she would stand at her kitchen counter furtively stuffing whole banana cream pies into her mouth. Then she could gain 10 pounds in four days of bingeing. But she masked her frenzied eating by following it with compulsive running and dieting.

Now, 17 years into recovery, she has completed a doctorate at Harvard University, earned a seminary degree and serves as associate rector of All Saints Church in Brookline, Mass. She made her visit to Cleveland to promote a new book, “Holy Hunger: A Memoir of Desire,” (Knopf).

But first, Bullitt-Jonas climbed into the enormous Italian marble pulpit at Trinity and preached two morning sermons, helping a tearful congregation face the departure of its well-regarded dean, the Rev. William D. Persell, who is being made bishop of the Diocese of Chicago.

“In the pain of separation,” Bullitt-Jonas told the assembled, “Jesus says, `I am with you and I will lead you to life.’ That to me is the great mystery: Even in the face of goodbye, even in the face of death, we discover the love that transcends death, that no death, no separation, can destroy. Love is what we were made for, and every time we stay open, and dare to love, Jesus draws nearer.”

The diminutive priest with the generous smile told Trinity’s members to resist breezy goodbyes. “It is so easy to make light of the sorrow that is part of saying goodbye, or to stuff it down with too much to eat or drink,” she said. “Going numb is a popular way of handling pain.”

Bullitt-Jonas knows. Her father, a dashing professor of English literature at Harvard, was an alcoholic. Her mother, a wealthy Radcliffe College trustee, was remote with depression. She calls her father “the master of words” and her mother “the master of silence.”

“Holy Hunger” is dedicated to them. She said her book’s underlying principle came straight out of Ephesians: to speak the truth and love.

“Tell a story about my father that was both loving and true?” she asks after ending her book with his funeral. “That would take me years. It’s a slow process sometimes, learning to see with a wider vision, a more generous heart.”

Bullitt-Jonas, whose classes at Episcopal Divinity School are regularly overbooked, sees her love of teaching as a legacy from her father, and her love of God as a legacy from her mother, an ardent Episcopalian who now lives with her daughter and teaches Buddhist meditation. The author said writing “Holy Hunger” led her to frame and hang black-and-white photographs of her ancestors as she puzzled over their stories and hers.

Bullitt-Jonas was adamant that this book not be misunderstood as the tale of a woman who turned to God and overcame the weaknesses of the flesh.

“As Christians, we have this whole history of splitting the body from the soul and misinterpreting Paul’s admonition to set aside the desires of the flesh when he meant flesh as the fallen world, not our physical selves,” Bullitt-Jonas said over her grapefruit juice at the Ritz. “By moving away from our bodies, we are forgetting the meaning of the incarnation, when God takes on flesh.”

In her private life, Bullitt-Jonas has taken on marriage and motherhood. She was pregnant when she was ordained. Although she still speaks a few times each week to a sponsor in Overeaters Anonymous, Bullitt-Jonas reports she is peaceful in her abstinence from processed sugar. Her husband and son eat the typical array of snacks, and the author leaves it to Robert Jonas to set food rules for their fourth-grader, Sam.

“It was fear that drove me into recovery, but it is love that keeps me there,” Bullitt-Jonas writes. “And there’s no going back. I used to think a saint was someone who had no desires. Now I know otherwise. A saint is someone who knows what he or she most deeply desires and, if need be, can let everything else go.

“By either definition, I’m no saint. Often I lose touch with what I really long for. I find myself kidnapped by lesser desires, smaller wants. But at least I can trust now that listening to my deepest desires is a worthy enterprise, even a holy one.”

Speaking in the nave of Trinity after services, Bullitt-Jonas declared, “They often say in addiction recovery that we have a God-shaped hole in us. …

“We live in a very addictive culture. Feel a little uncomfortable? Buy something. Take a little drink. Have a little bite. If we aren’t sensitive to what we are really looking for, searching for, hungry for, the culture around us will tell us in a heartbeat.”

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Asked what shook her up enough to send her to her first Overeaters Anonymous meeting, Bullitt-Jonas listed the suicide of a co-worker, the self-examination that came from organizing an intervention into her father’s drinking and an impulse to visit the monastery of the Society of St. John the Evangelist on the Charles River.

“When I stepped forward and stretched out my empty hands to receive Holy Communion, for the first time I noticed the sheer physicality of the sacramental bread and wine,” she writes. “You literally taste, you swallow, you take in God. I was amazed and moved to tears. It was as if Christ was willing to address me in the only language that I could presently understand, the language of food. … Here was the bread that might lead me home.”

To this day, Bullitt-Jonas said, she still finds it deeply moving to distribute communion.

And, she reminds her audiences, even after the insight at St. John, she went home and gorged. A few days later she walked into Overeaters Anonymous, even as she hissed to herself: “What a stew of self-help projects. What a lot of busy self-absorption.”

Instead, Bullitt-Jonas found “community, a network of relationships that penetrated the hard shell of my isolation.”

But she herself will give no eating disorder seminars. Instead, it is prayer that animates her: “I want to pass along everything I’ve learned about staying present with that One who loved us into being. It was God looking for me that finally made me show up at that monastery door.”

DEA END LONG