Posted on 08/04/2010 3:07:10 PM PDT by lqcincinnatus
Communion on the Moon
I love this. How many of you knew? Too bad this type news doesn't travel as fast as bad.
Communion on the Moon: July 20th, 1969
(This is an article by Eric Metaxas)
Forty years ago two human beings changed history by walking on the surface of the moon. But what happened before Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong exited the Lunar Module is perhaps even more amazing, if only because so few people know about it. I'm talking about the fact that Buzz Aldrin took communion on the surface of the moon. Some months after his return, he wrote about it in Guideposts magazine.
And a few years ago I had the privilege of meeting him myself. I asked him about it and he confirmed the story to me, and I wrote about in my book - Everything You Always Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid to Ask).
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.
He and Armstrong had only been on the lunar surface for a few minutes when Aldrin made the following public statement: "This is the LM pilot. I'd like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever 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." He then ended radio communication and there, on the silent surface of the moon, 250,000 miles from home, he read a verse from the Gospel of John, and he took communion. Here is his own account of what happened:
"In the radio blackout, 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.... Apart from me you can do nothing (John 15:5).
I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute [they] 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.
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.
And of course, it's interesting to think that some of the first words spoken on the moon were the words of Jesus Christ, who made the Earth and the moon - and Who, in the immortal words of Dante, is Himself the "Love that moves the Sun and other stars."
Nice story but communion was the easy part. Getting there was the amazing part.
I like that ! We need to make sure this is passed along since it has been censored in the state run media and state run text book producers.
Amen!
Without God there is no moon shot.
Google "Buzz Aldrin's lunar Communion" gets About 68,400 results (0.42 seconds).
FWIW, I certainly did. It's a mainstay of Apollo 11 lore, and recounted in OF A FIRE ON THE MOON, replete with Mailer's extensive musings on the matter:
... Tribal chief, first noble savage on the moon, he prayed to the powers who had brought him there, whose will he would fulfill - God, the earth, and himself all for this instant part of the lofty engine of the universe, and in that eccentric giant of a character, that conservative of all the roots in all the family trees, who now was ripping up the roots of the ages, that man whose mother's name was Moon, ...
... well, you can read it yourself, if you want to.
Not religious myself, but it is not lost on me. It was still a moving event that Aldrin did so.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zEZvPg1itw
Highly recommend the HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon”. It should be shown in all schools.
” And so the minister consecrated a communion wafer and a small vial of communion wine.”
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This is antichrist gibberish!
I didn’t know that Presbys had sunk so far. Is this for real?
Say what?>
“Consecrating” a “Wafer” goes against everything Christ stood for during his Earthly stay.
It’s not the men who consecrate it, it is the Lord himself.
Under the new NASA mandate, by next year it won't be a Christian communion, it will be some Islamic observance performed on the moon.
Believe it or not we learned this in Sunday school right after it happened. Very cool!
This is antichrist gibberish! I didn’t know that Presbys had sunk so far. Is this for real?
No... And the "cup provided by his church" thing is equally suspect. Reformed/Presbyterian do not generally pass the cup... so this would be considered unnecessary.
I would love it if the crew took Communion on the moon. I hope that much is true.
Yeah. But they did it on the islamist´s Moon.
“and state run text book producers”
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For sure!
We wouldn’t want to lead our kids astray you know...
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“I would love it if the crew took Communion on the moon. I hope that much is true.”
.
I certainly do not believe that the Lord would reject the communion of a true believer, regardles of the humanist shenanigans.
I see it as fitting that the first act on the moon was holy communion - in the face of the pagans that ran the Apollo program.
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Does this mean they held communion in a movie studio on a secret military base, where the Moon landings were faked?!?
/joke alert
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