I just remember the morning was sunny. I was supposed to go
to the office where I was the youth minister and do some office work, and I had
stopped by my girlfriend’s house which was on the way.
“Turn on the TV! Someone flew a plane into the World Trade
Center!”
My first reaction was to make a joke at my future
mother-in-law’s comment. If you have spent any amount of time with me, you know
that I make really stupid comments at the worst possible time, thinking them to
be funny. I think I am helping to lighten the mood.
When we turned on the news, it wasn’t funny. Smoke billowed out of the first of the
two buildings to be hit. I think it was the North Tower. There must be
something in the human condition that stops us from thinking things are as bad
as they are. For some reason, I started imagining scenarios where no one was
hurt.
That was impossible. There was so much smoke. And that hole.
That giant, gaping hole in the side of the building.
We just stared.
I’d like to say that I started praying right away, but I didn’t.
I was frozen.
I tried to think if I knew anyone in that building. I had
lived in the city for about four years and spent some time as a temporary
employee for places like Goldman Sachs, some other banks, and at one point
spent a week working in one of the financial centers.
I couldn’t remember anyone.
“There’s another plane!”
My brain shut down.
I immediately called my brother who lived about a mile north
of the towers. He said that he and his wife were okay. I told them to come out
to Long Island if they needed to get away. I seem to remember him mentioning
something about possibly going to a hospital to donate blood. A year later, he
and his new wife moved to Chicago so she could get her PhD in Classical
Studies.
My brain started running through every option possible in my
head so that I could be prepared for something else. My biggest fear was a
nuclear strike. The idea that some lunatic had gotten their hands on some
device from the Cold War and there would be no George Clooney or Nicole Kidman
that could save us.
“Would it travel the 35 miles from Manhattan to where I was
on Long Island?”
“How long would I stay before I just left?”
“How bad is this going to get? The Empire State Building?
St. Peter’s Cathedral?”
“Is this some plan to hit every single city?”
“Was I serious about wanting to get engaged to my
girlfriend?”
“I shouldn’t be wearing shorts and a t-shirt.”
I went back home to change. It seemed at the time like the
most logical thing to do. On the car radio, Don Imus announced that there were
reports of the Pentagon being hit and unconfirmed reports of a plane down in
Pennsylvania.
My cell phone rang.
It was the priest from our parish who ran youth ministry.
“We have to get to the high school now. We have to just be there. In case kids
have to talk.”
He was right.
I changed into jeans and a t-shirt, because somehow that
made me more professional. I went up to the high school. There was no Twitter.
There was no news. By and large the high school was keeping things quiet. If
someone asked a question it was answered, but no one was making a general
announcement. With the Long Island Rail Road, it was too easy for someone to
simply live in our town and work in Manhattan as a fireman, policeman, or any
one of a number of professions.
The high school students seemed to gravitate to us. They
asked questions we didn’t have answers to because we weren’t watching the news.
They asked us to pray for them. They just wanted to be around something safe,
it seemed to me. We had the type of relationship with the principal at the time
where our being on campus wasn’t an issue.
A gym teacher told us that one of the towers came down. I
had no idea what that meant and in my mind I couldn’t comprehend it. These
structures were massive pillars of steel that stretched to the sky, unstoppable
temples of engineering and power. They were the anchor of the skyline. How
could one of them just collapse?
Then the second one collapsed.
I didn’t see any of it. I just wanted to make sure that
everyone around me was okay. I called my mom, my girlfriend, my brother in
between classes.
That night there was a mass at the parish. It was mobbed.
Standing room only and perhaps 1200 packed the church. I remember being hopeful
that this would wake people up to the idea that they needed to get back to
church on a regular basis. I walked around, looking for someone to minister to.
I still had no idea what I was doing or what was going on. I
just kept putting myself in a position where if people needed someone, if a
teen needed someone, they could talk to me. I had no idea what I was going to
say. I had no idea what I was going to do. I just figured I would listen, pray,
and hopefully have something good to say that wasn’t completely stupid.
I would like to say that I immediately sprang to action and
coordinated a prayer night for the teens and an all out effort to relieve pain
and sorrow in the best youth ministry reaction to terror ever.
That would be a lie.
The truth was at the time I was scared, lost, out of my
league, and in a word… terrified.
The next morning I went to the bagel shop next to the youth
ministry offices. It’s New York, we are big on bagels and they really are
different here. I picked up a copy of the New York Times and there were pages
of pictures. Pictures of horrible destruction, death, and chaos. One picture of
a man falling is burned on my brain forever. For the first time, that morning,
alone in a bagel shop, I wept. I sat facing the wall, my head buried in my
hands and I just wept.
Then I prayed.
Then I went back to work. We had a youth ministry meeting coming and I
don’t remember what we were going to do, but it was pretty obvious that this event wasn’t going to simply pass by. I don’t remember exactly what we did but I
think it was a rap session (early 80’s youth ministry lingo) and Adoration. Our
music minister was NYPD and he would be working for the next two weeks and we
didn’t see him. I can't fathom what he went through.
I remember thinking that we were “fortunate” because none of
the kids that were regulars at our program lost any family members. That is a
really foolish thought. I lived and worked in a town that had a number of FDNY
that lost their lives. Streets are named after them. The funerals were at my
parish. I was like a deer in the headlights. I thought if I just put the sign
out that people would come in if they needed anything. That’s like the firemen
and police officers and rescue workers standing outside the Towers thinking,
“if anyone needs anything, they will come out and tell us.”
That wasn’t my job. That wasn’t my ministry. My job was to
go in if I saw a need and with disregard for my own self-consciousness. My own
intimidation. I was so scared of saying the wrong thing, of doing the wrong
thing, I was frozen and didn’t act with the boldness that someone empowered
with the Holy Spirit would do.
Maybe today, ten years later, knowing what I know now, I
would have acted differently.
Maybe I’m not the only one to think that.
A Fresh Coat of Paint
9/11 paints everything a different color. I don’t even know
if I am fully aware of it at times, but impacts my worldview and has for the
last ten years. That isn’t good. It is an unrealistic appraisal of risk.
Statistically, I know that I shouldn’t worry about the things that I worry
about, but I do.
Every time I am on a bridge, I wonder if this is the exact
moment that the nutjob with the truck is going to blow all of us into the
river. I secretly speed a little to get to the point in the bridge where I know
I am okay. Before I go on a bridge, or even in a tunnel, I pray that God will have
mercy on my soul because I am a sinner and I need that mercy if this is it.
A month or two after, lightning struck a house about 50
yards away from the house I was in. The noise was incredible. I imagined God
had simply unveiled a small amount of power on the Earth. I again prayed that God would have
mercy on my soul thinking that a nuclear bomb had finally gotten through
whatever layer of security existed.
I would have to plan youth ministry events around September
11. Students had parents that wouldn’t let them out of their sights on that
day. An event at Six Flags in New Jersey was on September 11 one year and it
became very difficult to get anyone to commit to bringing teens or even letting
their kids go. I recall even having difficulty convincing parents to let their
teens fly on a plane to the Leadership Conference at Notre Dame every
summer.
It was frustrating and I started getting angry and burying
it every time it came up.
I would pretend I was fine, that my heart wasn’t terrified,
even though it was.
I would pretend that I wasn’t bothered by people from the
Middle East, or even Muslims. Then I would swing to being completely unwilling
to tolerate any opinion that suggested a Muslim would even desire peace.
You would think the best of the human race that manifested
itself immediately after would stick around for a while, but the truth is it
died off after about four weeks. Calluses grew on my heart and soul. At one
point I wouldn’t care because we could all die at any second and then the next
second I would smother people about their faith because they could die at any
second. I was a pendulum swinging between an apathy due to the lack of control
or seeking to control everything to protect myself.
I would lose my temper when people just wouldn’t get how
important things were.
At least they were important to me.
Everywhere I looked someone was in pain because of this...
this... THING that 9/11 had become.
Widows.
Kids who lost parents.
Parents who lost kids.
Bumper stickers every day reminded me to “never forget” and
that was all I wanted to do.
One friend, who spent the better part of a few months
digging bodies out of Ground Zero and then going through the debris for human
body parts at the facility where they would dump everything in Staten Island
suffered so much physically, emotionally, and mentally, that our friendship
ended for about five years. I saw him again about five months ago and we just
talked for hours. He seemed better, but his health is bad. He spent too much
time breathing in the filth.
I look at my kids now, the kids who were born years later
and I want 9/11 to be a history lesson in school. A museum that they visit in
Manhattan when we go on a family trip. Like the Bronx Zoo or Museum of Natural
History. It’s research for a project. I don’t want them to live it.
This evil, this pain, this terror never just leaves.
I think that is why I was so relieved, happy, and lighthearted when Osama Bin Laden was reported dead. The darkest part of me was angry that he never suffered in his death, never suffered the public humiliation, disgrace, and ultimate painful execution he deserved. I wish I could say that I hope God has mercy on his soul, like I guess I am supposed to do, but I don't. My friend Fr. Dan Beeman probably handled it in the best way, but I just couldn't find it in my heart.
It’s multi-generational.
That evil that was unleashed at 9/11 caused families to fall
apart. People to collapse psychologically, physically, emotionally. Children
whose only memory of a parent is a picture or a video and who bury their pain
in bottles of alcohol, drugs, or sex.
That evil that was unleashed at 9/11 brought violence to the
Middle East. Innocent people died all over the world because of that day. Young
men and women who joined the military to escape poverty, pay for college, or as
a part-time job on the weekends found themselves in countries they never
thought they would be in. Some of them came home in pieces.
That evil that was unleashed at 9/11 brought a literal Hell
on Earth in all parts of the Earth.
“Where was God?”
I have been asked that in the last ten years more than any
question I have received on sex, morality, Catholicism, or anything else.
“Why didn’t God save those firemen? (soldiers, policemen,
innocent people, etc...)
The truth is I don’t know because I am not God. My best
response is that if God wasn’t involved it would have been much worse. 50,000
people worked in those buildings. 3000 died,
You hear terror stories now and then about some plot that was
averted, about the near tragedy that was prevented. You never know if it is an
urban legend, a myth, or a fact.
I know that Blessed John Paul II and Jesus said to “be not
afraid.”
I guess I’m not holy enough to be not afraid. I pray for
God’s mercy all the time because I have been successfully terrorized.
I wish I could be like Christ. I wish I could have been like
the FDNY, the NYPD, the Transit Authority officers who rushed in.
Who gave their lives.
Who sacrificed everything they were so that others could
live.
They never let the evil get to them. They faced evil and
simply were not afraid. They saw a need and ran.
I think about the people I met who were like that.
They sacrificed pay, luxury, their pride, so that they could help others to
really truly live. They never wimped out of talking to someone that was hurting.
They were never afraid to approach someone in pain.
The evangelizers.
The ones who loved, who made the concrete choice to love,
even when it hurt. Even when the sacrifice was painful and deep.
The volunteers who gave up time with their families to
help on a retreat.
To plan a prayer night.
To listen to a someone who was hurting.
To go outside of their comfort zone and pray with someone and
risk rejection.
I think about the priests I know who love, serve, and are
devoted to their spouse, the Church.
If there is no pain, then there is no sacrifice.
If there is no sacrifice, then how is it real love?
Yes, everything is painted a different color. It has to be.
There is no way that it cannot be. Like real paint, in time the colors will
fade. In the meantime, this pain is an opportunity to sacrifice, to love, and
to look into the eyes of my children and pray that one day there is someone who will not be afraid to show them Christ, even if their world has
been painted.
