As people and especially as Christians, we realize that God is multi-dimensional.
We realize that he is in all places and in all always. After all, ‘in the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth’. Spinning galaxies and light years serve as no obstacles, for time and place are subject to His command, and his presence and transcends time and space.
Many of the early astronauts who ventured into space the past 40 years actually took the ‘Eucharist’ aboard with them, the very sacrament which many Christians consider to be the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. It was actually a bold move, many times which needed to first be approved by the respective astronauts’ religious bishops, but bold nonetheless.
This further demonstrated these intrepid astro-scientists’ understanding, as that of the rest of the greater science community, that God is in all places and in all ways, even in this type of special human and tangible way.
Ever since the crew of Apollo 8 first quoted Genesis on Christmas eve 1968, as their ship orbited the moon, God has firmly again asserted his omnipresence in Space, as in all the other places of human thought and endeavor.
In 1969, Edward Buzz Aldrin, an elder in his Presbyterian church, quietly performed a personal communion service by himself, as he sat alone in the lander on the moon’s desolate surface. Their was no human around for thousands of miles. He knew however, he was never truly alone.
In 1994, aboard the Endeavor Shuttle, three Catholic astronauts received Holy Communion from one of the astronauts, a commissioned lay minister of the Eucharist.
NASA and the Russian Space agency never truly expressed any reservation regards this mystical out-of-world expression of faith in Space Station missions, perhaps not only for diplomacy’s sake, but perhaps out of appreciation that man, even as he ascends the heavens, is more then a mere physical entity.
So it was in outer Space that God, as he has done in other earthbound venues throughout millennia, made himself available and present
In this extraordinary manner.
Many consecrated Eucharistic (bread) hosts have since further been carried aboard space shuttles, with religious permission, since those very first efforts. A comforting thought affirming the presence of God throughout the cosmos and it’s unfathomable chasm of light years.
What better sign of God’s total complete presence, as shared and viewed among the splendored perspective of all creation!
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