Page 2 - Contact Winter 2018
P. 2
First Things
First Man: I recently went to see the First food: Something that the film did
film First Man at the cinema. It is the not show was the first food that was
story of the first landing on the moon taken on the moon. Buzz Aldrin actually
and focuses on Neil Armstrong and his celebrated communion. Aldrin said
family and the emotions surrounding over the radio: “I’d like to take this
the Apollo 11 landing. It is an excellent opportunity to ask every person
film and gives you an insight into the listening in, whoever and wherever
courage and riskiness of space travel they may be, to pause for a moment
fifty years ago. It still amazes me that and contemplate the events of the
we were able to send men to the moon past few hours and to give thanks
that long ago – even that they were in his or her own way.” He then
able to talk to them while they were observed thanksgiving his way, by
so far away. Our communications taking out a small communion kit that
have moved on so much now but the had been prepared by the Houston
ingenuity and creativity of mankind is church where he served as an elder. In
a marvellous thing. his 2009 book Magnificent Desolation,
Aldrin describes the scene this way:
First words: We are reminded in the I reached into my personal preference
film of those famous first words uttered kit and pulled out the communion
as Armstrong set foot on the moon - elements along with a three-by-five
“That’s one small step for man, one card on which I had written the words
giant leap for mankind.” The film of Jesus: “I am the vine, you are the
touches on the debate around the branches. Whoever remains in me, and
space race and whether it was worth I in him, will bear much fruit; for you
all the money and cost in lives. We tend can do nothing without me.” I poured a
to forget that people lost their lives in thimbleful of wine from a sealed plastic
the Gemini expeditions that preceded container into a small chalice, and
Apollo. waited for the wine to settle down as
it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity
of the Moon. . . I silently read the Bible
passage as I partook of the wafer and
the wine, and offered a private prayer
for the task at hand and the
opportunity I had been given.
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the
Moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man
that thou art mindful of him? And the Son of Man, that thou
visitest him?” Psalm 8:3-4
