[Ed. note: Received this in an e-mail from my folks a little while back, but it’s perfect for today’s anniversary. Can you imagine the outcry from the godless liberal media if this were to happen today? Why, there’d be suits by the ACLU flying all over the place!]

43 years ago…guess what happened… a non-publicized event

Communion on the Moon: July 20, 1969

Forty-three 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 Holy 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.

The background to the story is that Aldrin was an elder at his Presbyterian Church, 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.’

“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 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.”

It’s a wonderful story, but kind of sad in a way to see how far the forces of Satan have progressed in four decades and how they continue to work against the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth in all of its forms, both from within and without.

Truly, a nation that has lost its religion has lost itself.