Jul 20 2009
40 Years Ago - A Miracle on the Surface of the Moon
Although our church calendar marks today as the feast of liberators and prophets it is also worth commemorating another event which happened on this date forty years ago. Human beings found themselves on a space that was not the earth. This event for ever changed how we viewed our own place on this planet and in our universe. To some degree we can never return to “the way things were.” Although the event of the lunar landing was met with much celebration (and a persistent denial as well) another part of this experience, kept quiet for 20 years, was a small act of piety by Buzz Aldrin, a member of the Episcopal Church.
The moon lander touched down at 3:17 Eastern Standard Time, Sunday, July 20, 1969.
Aldrin had brought with him a tiny communion kit, given him by his church, that had a silver chalice and wine vial about the size of the tip of his finger. During the morning he radioed, “Houston, this is Eagle. This is the LM pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, whoever or wherever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the last few hours, and to give thanks in his own individual way.”
“In the radio blackout,” he wrote later, “I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit.’ I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute Deke Slayton had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O’Hare, the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly…” “Eagle’s metal body creaked. I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements.”
Joseph Campbell wrote in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, templese become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult. To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.”
In our world faith is often attacked for being irrational and at the same time people within many faith traditions try to kill the living movement of belief by legalizing it and saying that interaction with God is solely about moral behavior. The Apollo mission relied on a great deal of science and mathematics in order to bring about the feat of putting two human beings on the surface of a lifeless rock. It could be said that in this moment there was conclusive proof that God was not in the heavens and that all there was was more space. Yet, in the sea of Tranquility, a young pilot found that even on the moon there was a deeper reality that transcended life on earth. In the furthest heavens God’s love continues to make a home within us.
Readings for remembering the First Communion on the Moon
Romans 8:35-39
35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36As it is written:
”For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”[l] 37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[m] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
From Psalm 139
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, [a] you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
John 15:4-5,8-9
Jesus said, “abide in me as I abide in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. By this is God glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love.”
