The Day the World Stopped Feeling Safe
Twenty-five years after September 11, I still have the rosary I carried. I am only now beginning to understand why I reached for it.
I think September 11 was the day I lost my innocence.
I was seventeen. Until then, life had felt safe. It was street hockey with my brothers and the neighborhood boys until the lights came on and we ran inside to our parents. It was laser tag and hanging out at the mall with friends. There were colleges to think about, plans to make, and very little reason, in my experience, to believe the adults in my life might leave for work and never come home.
One week before the towers fell, I had finished an internship in Lower Manhattan, about a block from the World Trade Center. My uncle worked there. He had helped me get the position.
In the mornings, I would take the subway downtown and stop in the mall beneath the towers for a bagel. No coffee. I was still too young for that, which should tell you how much has changed.
I would wander around until it was time to report for work. There was a Warner Bros. store where I liked looking at the Harry Potter tchotchkes. Around me, men in business suits and women in their power suits were heading off to their very important jobs upstairs.
That was the World Trade Center I knew. A place to get breakfast. A place to browse. A place where people went to work.
Then my internship ended, and I went back to high school.
A week later, I was sitting in Italian class when we heard something was wrong in the city.
Our teacher turned on the television on one of those TV carts schools used to wheel into classrooms. We watched what we thought was a terrible accident. The pictures didn’t seem real.
Then, while we were watching, the second plane hit.
We understood that someone was doing this.
I don’t remember exactly how the rest of the school day unfolded. What I remember is the fear, and the stories that began moving through the building.
The Chrysler Building was down. The Empire State Building was down. The Statue of Liberty was down.
None of it was true. But we were a building full of frightened teenagers, without smartphones in our pockets to check what we were hearing. Every new rumor made the world outside seem more terrifying.
Then someone said Penn Plaza was down.
My father worked there.
My uncle worked near the World Trade Center, in the office where I had been an intern just a week earlier.
We couldn’t reach them. We didn’t know whether they were alive.
Eventually, school let us go home. We waited by the phone for some word about my father and my uncle. I remember that helplessness so clearly. There was nothing useful to do with all that fear. We just needed the phone to ring.
Eventually, we learned that both of them were safe. Getting home was another ordeal, one I remember in pieces: long walks, the Brooklyn Bridge, hitchhiking, trying to find someone who could help. Over the next day or two, they made their way back to us.
I can’t remember whether we returned to school the next day. I know we were back by the day after that.
And then we began finding out whose parents had come home, and whose were still missing.
My father was safe. My uncle was safe.
I was sitting among children who still couldn’t say that.
I didn’t understand the forces behind what had happened. I knew almost nothing about al-Qaeda or Islamic extremism. What I knew about Islam could fit in a thimble.
These people felt so strongly about us they devastated my community. I had no idea who they even were.
I was seventeen, and I wanted to do something.
At church, I had recently received a pin recognizing ten years of service in religious education. I had started as a Sunday School teacher’s assistant teaching five-year-olds and eventually I had a classroom of my own. I would keep teaching until I left for college the following year.
The pin was oval, with a gold image of a lamb with a cross. It said “Diocese of Rockville Centre” and “10 Years of Service.”
For some reason, I put it on.
I wore it for days. I also grabbed my rosary and carried it around with me.
Nobody asked me to pray the rosary with them. Nobody saw the pin and asked me to do anything. I couldn’t have explained very well what I thought would happen.
It just made me feel as though, if somebody needed me, I was available.
It’s funny what we reach for when life gets frightening.
In the years before September 11, when my father traveled for business, we could go to the airport gate and wave through the window as he boarded. I had parents who felt comfortable sending their seventeen-year-old son into Manhattan for an internship in the shadow of the Twin Towers.
Afterward, those ordinary memories belonged to a world I couldn’t quite get back to.
Even after my father came home, I knew something I hadn’t really known before: coming home wasn’t guaranteed.
I want to be careful here. The world had felt safe to me. Other people had already learned what I was learning. Some had learned it through the Vietnam war, some through the racism and violence of the civil rights movement, some learned it in their own homes. People older than I was had lived through upheavals I had only encountered in textbooks and movies.
My childhood sense of safety was a gift. It also depended on how much I had never had to understand.
Still, there is a difference between knowing, somewhere in your mind, that terrible things happen and waiting beside a telephone because they may have happened to your father.
Perhaps every generation has a day that divides life into before and after. Some of us have a date the whole world recognizes. Others remember a doctor’s appointment, a knock at the door, or the blow-up after which their family was never the same.
For me, it was September 11.
And I’ll be honest, the years since have felt like one upheaval after another: wars, the financial crisis, hurricane Katrina, a pandemic that made even being near the people we loved feel dangerous, and January 6th. Just when we thought we might catch our breath, there was always something else to fear.
After a while, you begin to wonder when you will feel safe again.
You may also begin to wonder what, exactly, you can still ask of God.
God, why?
How could You let this happen? Why them? Why us? Where were You?
I still reach for my faith. I still have those questions.
As a priest, I have no intention of scolding anyone for asking them. Scripture gives us language for precisely this kind of prayer. “How long, O Lord?” the psalmist asks. Jesus Himself cries from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 13:1; Mark 15:34)
There is room within faith to tell God that we cannot understand what He has allowed. There is room to be angry, bewildered, and exhausted. We do not have to make our grief presentable before bringing it to Him.
And I won’t tell you that the children whose parents never came home needed that loss to learn something. I won’t suggest that their families were less protected because they prayed less faithfully than mine. I won’t say there was some greater good in it.
My father came home. Many of my friends’ fathers did not. I can give thanks for my family’s relief while refusing to pretend I have an explanation for another family’s devastation.
Twenty-five years later, I still don’t have an answer that makes that morning acceptable.
What I have is a faith centered on a Christ who entered human suffering, who loved people He could lose, who suffered violence Himself. When I look at the cross, I see how far God was willing to come into the world we are afraid to inhabit.
And when I confess the Resurrection, I am placing my hope in His promise that death will not ever have the final word. I am doing that while knowing how long grief can last, and how much we still have to endure.
That faith leaves me with something to do here, among the living.
There are frightened people who need company. There are grieving people who need someone willing to hear the same story again. There are neighbors who need protection, families who need food, and people whose losses have disappeared from everyone else’s attention because the anniversary has passed.
We can help make life safer for one another. We can take precautions, oppose violence, and care about what happens to people beyond our own front doors. We can also recognize that no amount of vigilance will give us complete control over whether someone we love comes home.
Living with that knowledge is hard. Loving with that knowledge takes courage.
If you are struggling to find that courage today, you don’t owe anyone an inspiring recovery. You are allowed to need someone beside you. There will be days when we can offer our strength and days when we have to borrow someone else’s.
I think faithfulness has a great deal to do with being willing to do both.
I still have that rosary.
The pale beads and the crucifix in this photograph are the ones I carried twenty-five years ago. I can’t find the pin, but I remember it.
The rosary I carried in September 2001. Twenty-five years later, I still have it.
While preparing this reflection, I told the story of putting on that pin and carrying those beads. I explained that I thought they might somehow let someone know I was available.
And then I recognized something about my own life that had never quite dawned on me before.
And I cried.
At seventeen, I couldn’t explain the horror unfolding around us. I couldn’t bring anyone home. But I could carry my rosary, put on my pin, and hope that if somebody needed something I could give, they would know they could ask.
Twenty-five years later, I write, I pray, I listen, and I try to reach people who feel frightened or alone. I have more words now. I have training. I have a collar. I drink considerably more coffee.
But I am still reaching for that faith.
I wish I could promise you that everyone you love will always come home. I wish I could give you back the world as it felt before your own life divided into before and after.
What I can offer is what that seventeen-year-old boy was trying to offer, without quite knowing how.
I’m here.
If you need me.
And Let us Pray…
God of mercy,
We remember before You every life taken on September 11, and every person who still aches for someone who never came home. You know their names, their laughter, and all the ordinary things their families miss. Hold them in Your eternal love, and be near to those who mourn them.
Care for the responders whose bodies still bear the cost of helping others. Give them the treatment, comfort, and companionship they need. Strengthen those who care for them, especially when the days are long and their own strength is running low.
You know what changed in each of us that morning. Hear the questions we still cannot answer, the anger we struggle to express, and the prayers that have become difficult to say.
Help us live faithfully with what we now know about the fragility of life. When fear tempts us to close ourselves off, give us courage to love. Keep our grief from becoming hatred, and help us recognize Your image in people we have been taught to fear.
When we have something to give, help us offer it. When we need someone beside us, help us ask.
And when we reach for You, with trembling hands and unfinished prayers, meet us there.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
If you have a story of September 11 you’d like to share, please feel free to leave it in the comments. You’re welcome to remember someone you lost, someone who helped you, or simply what has stayed with you through these twenty-five years. I’d be grateful to hear it.
If someone came to mind while you were reading, please consider sharing this reflection with them. It may give you a reason to reach out and ask how they’re doing today.
Before you go, there’s something I’d like us to do together.
Today, I’ll be donating the first payment from every new paid subscription to Message From the Margins to the Ray Pfeifer Foundation, after platform and processing fees. The foundation helps September 11 first responders with medical needs their insurance doesn’t cover.
If you’ve been thinking about becoming a supporting subscriber, I’d be grateful if you would join us today. Your first payment will help care for those responders, and your continued support will help keep this ministry available to the people who need it.
This is simply a personal pledge. There’s no formal partnership or affiliation. I’ll tally what comes in, make the donation through their website, and let you know what we were able to give together.
Thank you for reading, for remembering, and for being here.