I think many of you in my age range know exactly where you were on July 20th, 1969. Safe to say that you were planted in front of a television, as I was, glued to history unfolding in front of us. This was the day that Neil Armstrong, and later Buzz Aldrin, walked across the surface of the moon. Along with command module pilot, Michael Collins, high above the lunar surface. The black and white, grainy images (by today’s standards) revealed the final decent onto the lunar surface of Armstrong as he proclaimed, “This is one small step for man but one giant leap for mankind”. What an achievement! How could three men climb into what amounts to riding an atomic bomb, cross the vastness of space, to rendezvous with a relatively tiny cosmic body hundreds of thousands of miles away then land on that surface and walk around. Where no person had ever before set foot. What led to the kind of faith this had to take?
Well, the moon mission did not begin when Apollo 11 took off from Cape Canaveral on July 16th. It began many years earlier, in 1958, when the United States launched the first satellite into space. It continued with the announcement in 1961 by President John F Kennedy that pledged that the US would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. What followed were the first manned space flights of the Mercury and then the Gemini programs. Apollo was the natural outgrowth of those programs and led to the eventual moon landings.
So the crew of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were flying on the faith that the astronauts and ground crews before them did their jobs and would support their endeavor and bring them home safely.
Webster defines Faith as:
“Complete TRUST or confidence in someone or something”
We can also see this type of faith in the voyages of Columbus seeking the New World, or the explorers traversing to the North Pole or climbing Mt. Everest. We travel everyday on highways and streets having faith that the roads, bridges and other drivers will have met their responsibilities resulting in our journeys ending safely. We trust someone or something.
But what does the Catholic Church say about faith? The catechism in paragraph 150 says that faith is:
“Personal adherence of whole man to God”
In other sections of the catechism we see faith as being a gift from God with the interior help of the Holy Spirit. That it is necessary for salvation. That it is a foretaste of the knowledge that will make us blessed in the life to come.
And it is the Church itself that nourishes our faith. It is the Church, through Scripture, Tradition and the Magisterium (the centuries of bishops and popes) that has handed down our faith from the time of Christ to now. St. Cyprian said, “No one can have God as Father without having the Church as Mother”
The secular examples of faith I cited above can all be seen as a journey. A beginning and an end connected by a stepping out into the unknown. There are numerous examples of similar journeys in the Scriptures. With the difference being that the faith of these individuals rested squarely on the promises of, and trust in, God.
Abraham left his home to wander the desert in search of the new home that God had promised him. He trusted that God would make his descendants as numerous as the stars even though he and Sarah were old and past their reproductive years. He trusted God when He told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.
Mary and Joseph relied on the word of God’s angels to take on the task of raising the Son of God. The Apostles walked away from the lives they knew to follow Jesus. The children of Fatima faced great hardships relating their stories of their visions of the Blessed Mother as many in authority fought to discredit them.
These stories of reliance on God were also journeys. They did not involve the travel across the great distances that the Apollo astronauts or Columbus ventured. But the journeys of early Christians represented leaps of faith. Of trust in God. Of departing from the safety of what they knew into the unknown of belief and trust.
Faith in God is not blind faith. Not blind hope. Our faith rests on the certainties of the words and miracles of Christ. On lives of the saints and martyrs who gave their lives because of their firm trust in God. It rests on the visions that have been the gifts of Jesus and His Mother. Of the miracles which prove of the real presence in the eucharist. On Christ’s image left on the Shroud of Turin. Of Mary’s image left on the Tilma of Juan Diego. It comes as we see the incredible beauty and wonder of the world around us.
But, ultimately, our faith rests in the promises Christ made to us. To always be with us, to guide us and to ultimately provide us with an eternal home with Him. And all He asks of us is the same question He asked of the Apostles in today’s Gospel reading. Following Jesus calming the seas and quelling their fears. After all that they had seen and heard. And all that we have seen and heard.
“Why are you terrified? Do you not YET have faith?”
Oh and, by the way. Many of you may not be aware that Aldrin is the first, and likely the only, person to have received communion (bread and wine) on a cosmic body other than earth. After touching down on the moon, and after reading John 5:15 (“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me.”) Aldrin consumed the bread and wine sent with him by his Presbyterian pastor.
