Communion on the moon

  • chalice1.jpgA friend sent me one of those ser­ial emails that get bounced around, and though the story intrigued me, I dis­missed it as being an urban leg­end. But a quick trip to Snopes con­firmed that it really hap­pened: Yep, on July 20, 1969, Buzz Aldrin took a moment before set­ting foot on the moon to take communion.

    The email says that it’s taken from an arti­cle by Eric Metaxas:

    The back­ground to the story is that Aldrin was an elder at his Pres­by­ter­ian Church in Texas dur­ing this  period in his life, and know­ing that he would soon be doing some­thing unprece­dented in human his­tory, he felt  he should mark the occa­sion some­how, and he asked his min­is­ter to help him. And so the min­is­ter con­se­crated a com­mu­nion wafer  and a small vial of com­mu­nion wine. And Buzz Aldrin took them with him out of the Earth’s orbit and on to the sur­face of the moon.

    And here is Buzz Aldrin’s account of how that went, from his book “Mag­nif­i­cent Des­o­la­tion” (empha­sis mine):

    chalice1.jpgI had orig­i­nally asked Dean Woodruff, pas­tor at Web­ster Pres­by­ter­ian Church, where my fam­ily and I attended ser­vices when I was home in Hous­ton, to help me come up with some­thing I could do on the moon, some appro­pri­ate sym­bolic act regard­ing the uni­ver­sal­ity of seek­ing. I had thought in terms of doing some­thing patri­otic, but every­thing we came up with sounded trite and jin­go­is­tic. I set­tled on a well-known expres­sion of spir­i­tu­al­ity: cel­e­brat­ing the first Chris­t­ian com­mu­nion on the moon, much as Christo­pher Colum­bus and other explor­ers had done when they first landed in their ‘new world.’

    I wanted to do some­thing pos­i­tive for the world, so the spir­i­tual aspect appealed greatly to me, but NASA was still smart­ing from a law­suit filed by athe­ist Mada­lyn Mur­ray O’Hair after the Apollo 8 astro­nauts read from the bib­li­cal cre­ation account in Genesis. …

    So, dur­ing those first hours on the moon, before the planned eat­ing and rest peri­ods, I reached into my per­sonal pref­er­ence kit and pulled out the com­mu­nion ele­ments along with a three-by-five card on which I had writ­ten the words of Jesus: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Who­ever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit, for you can do noth­ing with­out me.” I poured a thim­ble­ful of wine from a sealed plas­tic con­tainer into a small chal­ice and waited for the wine to set­tle down as it swirled in the one-sixth earth grav­ity of the moon. My com­ments to the world were inclu­sive: “I would like to request a few moments of silence … and to invite each per­son lis­ten­ing in, wher­ever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and con­tem­plate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” I silently read the Bible pas­sage as I par­took of the wafer and the wine, and offered a pri­vate prayer for the task at hand and the oppor­tu­nity I have been given. …

    Per­haps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to cel­e­brate com­mu­nion. Although it was a deeply mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ence for me, it was a Chris­t­ian sacra­ment, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind — be they Chris­tians, Jews, Mus­lims, ani­mists, agnos­tics or athe­ists. But at the time, I could think of no bet­ter way to acknowl­edge the enor­mity of the Apollo 11 expe­ri­ence than by giv­ing thanks to God. it was my hope that peo­ple would keep the whole event in their minds and see, beyond minor details and tech­ni­cal achieve­ments, a deeper mean­ing — a chal­lenge, and the human need to explore what­ever is above us, below us, or out there.

    I like the visual of the con­se­crated wine swirling in its own slow-motion effect in a lit­tle chal­ice. I imag­ine it would’ve been fairly sur­real, but then what about being on the sur­face of the moon wouldn’t be surreal.

    I might’ve felt a lit­tle let down by Aldrin’s sub­se­quent nod to polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and the ecu­meni­cal spirit at the end, but that’s the age we live in now. Expres­sions of Chris­t­ian spir­i­tu­al­ity are deemed offen­sive in inverse pro­por­tion to how uniquely and pow­er­fully Chris­t­ian they are. And whether the astro­naut has regrets now or not, it still makes me feel good to know that on behalf of all human­ity, he cel­e­brated the Lord’s Sup­per in the Sea of Tran­quil­ity (or thereabouts).


    Related posts:

    1. Ris­ing to God with­out machines
    2. Holy Fri­day
    3. The peo­ple speak to “DaVinci”
    4. St. Mary of Egypt
    5. No room at the inn. Or the megachurch.

    June 3rd, 2010 | Grace | No Comments |

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