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COMMUNION ON THE MOON, JULY 20, 1969                                       (This is an article by Eric  Metaxas)   Forty-two 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'."     “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."