The Apollo 11 crew had a variety of foods that were nutritious if not delicious. Much of it was freeze-dried in pouches, so astronauts had to squirt water into the bags and squish the contents around to prepare the food. There was no hot water aboard the Lunar Module, so the moonwalkers were stuck with cold meals and snacks for a day.
But the first things a man ate and drank on the moon were a Communion wafer and a thimbleful of wine.
Buzz Aldrin was a Presbyterian church elder at the time. The pastor of Webster Presbyterian in suburban Houston near the Johnson Space Center gave him a home Communion kit to take to the moon. It contained the wafer, a tiny vial of wine and a thumb-sized silver chalice.
NASA had urged Aldrin not to celebrate the sacrament publicly. Atheist activist Madelyn Murray O'Hare had already filed suit because the Apollo 8 crew read from the Book of Genesis for all the world to hear as they orbited the moon on Christmas Eve the year before.
So instead, Aldrin got on the radio shortly after the moon landing and asked everyone listening to observe 'a few moments of silence' to think about what had just happened and to give thanks in their own way.
Aldrin's way was to turn off the microphone and administer Communion to himself. Armstrong watched silently as Aldrin poured the wine, read a few lines of scripture from a card, then ate the wafer and drank from the tiny cup.
It was years before Aldrin told anyone about his Communion on the moon. He doesn't attend church anymore. Wine is no longer on his menu. Aldrin has been outspoken recently about his battle with alcoholism and his 30 years of sobriety.
'My Sunday mornings are spent in a recovery meeting in Pacific Palisades,' he told the New York Times.
Aldrin brought the little chalice back from the moon and returned it to Webster Presbyterian Church, which has it locked in a safe-deposit box. The church uses a replica of the chalice every year in a service marking the anniversary of the first moon landing.
A story passed to me on the internet. A very important distinction is that this is not the true presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Still an interesting story of the role God played in the astronaut's lives
