Do I remember what I was doing when man first walked on the moon?
Indeed I do.
I was traveling that summer with a team from Lutheran Youth Encounter, a “parachurch” ministry that sent teams of college-aged Lutherans to work with the youth in various congregations. We usually spent a week in each church, but we’d had a cancellation for this week, and our team’s leader (a Type-A overachiever of whom I was in awe at the time) had put us to work cold-calling churches all over the Ohio District (because that was where we were). Finally we’d found an urban Cleveland church that was a little desperate because it was between pastors, and somebody apparently thought bringing us in would provide “something for the kids.”
As I recall it, it was a pretty bad fit, and I’m not at all sure they felt they got their money’s worth.
Anyway, I remember that on the day of the landing I was sitting all by myself in the upstairs church offices. I have no idea where everybody else was, or what they were doing. Maybe it was a free day. Anyway, I was at loose ends, and I found C. S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain in the church library. I read it through. It was my first encounter with that book.
But I think the landing was in the evening. Our team leader and I were staying with a semi-hippie couple in an upstairs duplex (the wife was clearly unhappy to have us there; the husband was laid back and seemed to consider the whole thing ‘a trip,’ as we used to say in those quaint old days). They didn’t have a TV, so we missed the landing.
But I did sit with the husband out on the upstairs porch, discussing “heavy” subjects like the existence of God. It was his opinion that Jesus Christ “really hung us up” by dying on the Cross. In his view, he didn’t want saving, and he was somewhat resentful that anyone had put him in a position of obligation without consulting him first.
And he described the movie 2001, a Space Odyssey to me. “That was really heavy,” he said. “Really profound and spiritual.” (I’d never seen the film, and still haven’t, all these years later.)
It was one of my first experiences of sharing my faith with someone who lived on another entire conceptual planet. But hardly the last.
My memory is that it was on a Sunday evening and, extraordinarily, the evening service at church was canceled so that people could stay home and watch it on TV.
For us, in New Zealand (EST plus eighteen hours, more or less) it happened Monday lunchtime to three o’clock. School stopped, and we listened in the classroom to the moon landing.
We listened to the moon landing on an old valve radio that had “cathedral window” speaker outlets. Quite a few people still didn’t have TVs then, and TVs in schools were unheard of.
I remember being affronted by “Houston” being pronounced “Hooston”. And I was sure I’d be living on the moon by now :-/
Cheers
In America we generally pronounce it “Hyoos-ton,” which was (I believe) the pronunciation used by Sam Houston, the remarkable American the city was named after.
Now that I know that the landing was on Sunday, I remember something else significant about that day. It was the day I heard the first seriously liberal–not just mushy, but subversive–sermon of my life.
The church had invited a young seminarian to fill the vacant pulpit that week. He was a slight, bespectacled fellow, as I recall, and he stood in the high pulpit and announced, “As I’ve visited churches in the last year or so, I’ve noticed some changes in how people recite the creeds. People don’t sound as sure as they used to when they say, ‘born of the Virgin Mary,’ and ‘the third day He rose again.'”
The seminarian drew no conclusions from this. He just reported his impression. The lesson seemed to be, “Our religion is evolving before our eyes. Won’t it be interesting to see what it evolves into?”
We thought that day that the moon landing was the future. But that sermon was the future.