Many of you will have read these stories before. I’m sorry to be a bore, but I need to tell them again on this day.
Twenty-five years. In those horrible, beautiful autumn days back then, it seemed impossible that we would ever forget, or that the trauma would fade. For many years afterward, my wife and I would decorate our family Christmas tree with laminated prayer cards from the funerals of firefighters. We would pray for their souls, and for their loved ones, remembering how much they must be suffering at Christmas.
And then there were no more family Christmas trees for me. I’ll never see those prayer cards again. But that’s another story. It slightly sickens me that here, on the anniversary of the great catastrophe, my mind turns to my own personal great catastrophe. It’s vanity, I guess, but I was thinking last night about how my ex-wife and I used to talk back then about how one day, our grandkids would come visit and ask us what it was like to live in New York on 9/11. Now that’s not going to happen. I don’t know why that occurred to me when I was thinking about what to say here. But it did.
Over the quarter-century since witnessing up close the greatest act of evil in my lifetime, and living, with millions of other New Yorkers, the immediate fallout in the lives of the city and its people, I have learned that nobody gets out of this life without suffering, often greatly. I was 34 years old on that day, and had a lot yet to learn.
In just this past week, I’ve had two separate conversations with people who are living through the agony of particular family members having decided to go “no contact” — cutting them and other relatives completely out of their lives. The pain is immense, and the futility of reason and mercy in the face of the suffering only adds to it.
Isn’t it, you know, kind of obscene to compare that kind of suffering, as awful as it is, to what happened on 9/11? Mostly, yes, but please stick with me here — I have a point about living through a catastrophe that pulverizes everything you thought was normal.
What I’m getting at has to do with something I saw after attending a firefighter’s funeral at a Catholic parish in Brooklyn Heights, near the neighborhood fire station. They lost eight men that day, from that one station. In the Before Times, my wife and I would take our little boy by that station on long walks, and let him talk to the firefighters. They would let him sit in their big red truck and pretend to drive it. And then one blue-sky September day, most of them were turned to dust.
I forget the name of the firefighter whose funeral I attended at Assumption Church on Cranberry Street that morning, but I’ll never forget standing on the sidewalk across the street from the church after the funeral, and watching the widow and her little kids say their final goodbyes to the mourners, then walk, hand in hand, alone down the sidewalk, towards their minivan. They had to climb in together, and drive off into their new lives, without a husband and a father. I can see them now. The kids now probably have children of their own. Their father’s image hung on my Christmas tree for two decades, as long as I had a family. We prayed for them.
The worst had happened to that woman and her children. And yet, they had to go on.
This is what I’m getting at. If God is merciful, none of us will ever have to live through something like 9/11 again — not just the events of that day, but the long aftermath. The days of the acrid smell of burning plastic, the faint sweetness of burning human flesh, scenting the air of the city like satanic perfume. The agony of seeing all the handbills posted everywhere in the city for missing persons that you knew would never be found. The endless funerals. I could go on. You had to be there.
Here’s the thing: I give thanks that I was there. For all the evil we saw, and all the public pain we New Yorkers endured, there was a tremendous, once-in-a-lifetime blessing in it all. It’s hard to talk about, because one doesn’t want to diminish the grief and rage of that day and its aftermath. But grief and rage isn’t the whole story.
Walker Percy had this philosophical-psychological theory about hurricanes. Here is Walter Isaacson describing it, using Will Barrett, one of Percy’s characters:
Will Barrett’s hurricane insight is prompted by the recollection of a date he had with a girl named Midge. Driving through Connecticut, they are caught in a Northeastern hurricane and seek shelter at a diner. When the wind breaks a window, they help the counter attendant board it up. “Midge and the counterman,” Percy writes, “were very happy. The hurricane blew away the sad, noxious particles which befoul the sorrowful old Eastern sky and Midge no longer felt obliged to keep her face stiff. They were able to talk. It was best of all when the hurricane’s eye came with its so-called ominous stillness. It was not ominous. Everything was yellow and still and charged up with value.”
Percy’s diagnosis was that when we are mired in the everydayness of ordinary life, we are susceptible to what he called “the malaise,” a free-floating despair associated with the feeling that you’re not a part of the world or connected to the people in it. You are alienated, detached. As Percy put it in “The Moviegoer,” “The malaise has settled like a fallout and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall.” The heroes of his books, each in his own way, embark on a search for the cause and cure of this syndrome. “What is the nature of the search?” wonders Binx Bolling, the narrator of “The Moviegoer.” “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”
As heavy, often unbearably so, those autumn and winter days were after the attack, the hidden blessing in it was that New Yorkers were overwhelmingly and uncharacteristically kind to each other. I’ve never seen such an outpouring of charity and mercy. We knew it wouldn’t last, and it couldn’t last, but it was real, and it was with us for a while. Because of That Day, the unbearable lightness of being was sent into exile for a period. Life had weight again. Things mattered. *People *mattered. God mattered.
I didn’t see this with my own eyes, but someone at my Maronite Catholic parish did, and told me about out. As the towers burned across the East River, our pastor, the elderly monsignor Ignace Sadek, who earlier in life had led his Beirut parish through the civil war there, hurried down Montague Street to the Brooklyn Heights promenade, to pray. This is near to where he would have stood that morning:
Meanwhile, I was standing here at that moment:
When the south tower came down, a vast white cloud of dust began moving across the river, towards Brooklyn, engulfing the promenade and the neighborhood. My fellow parishioner saw the old monsignor facing the cloud, with his hands upraised in prayer. Strangers ran to the priest, fell on their knees next to him, and begged him to hear their confessions. It felt like the end of the world.
It was like that for weeks and months. Everybody talks about the fear, the grief, the pain, and the horror. The next day, September 12, we cooked some food and took it up to the Brooklyn Heights fire station to leave for the men who survived. When we arrived, we found that many of our neighbors had done the same thing. I spoke there to a young man and his wife who had just dropped off a pan of lasagna. The man’s eyes were covered with gauze.
He had been an office worker in the towers, and though he had escaped, he was still close enough to the south tower collapse that powdered glass from the cloud had abraded his eyes, temporarily blinding him. He told me that a stranger took his by the arm, led him across the Brooklyn Bridge, to his apartment in the Heights, got him settled at home safely, then left. He never learned the stranger’s name. The man said he and his wife figured all they could do to repay this kindness was to bring food to the surviving firefighters and the grieving widows gathered in the station down the block.
This kind of thing happened all the time, for weeks and weeks. It was so beautiful. It really was. I don’t know why we can’t be that way all the time, but we can’t seem to manage it. Still, for a period of time, Americans living in the toughest, most cynical city in the country opened their hearts to each other. I thank God that I was able to see it, to be part of it.
Some days later, my Uncle Carl Bassett, a Lutheran (LCMS) pastor who was also an FBI chaplain, phoned me from Ground Zero. “You’ve got to get down here,” he said. He told me that a construction worker on the site, Frank Silecchia, an Evangelical Christian, had discovered what we now call the Ground Zero Cross, and was taking broken firefighters and rescue workers there to pray. An hour or two later, Uncle Carl escorted Frank outside the perimeter to meet with me and tell me the story, which I broke the next day in my *New York Post *column.
▶Here’s Frank telling the story later, for a History Channel documentary. What I remember is that Matterhorn of a man standing in front of me, filthy from the work he had been doing on the site, recounting the story, and then telling me, in his simple, plainspoken way, how Jesus had saved him earlier from drug abuse and a bad life. And now he considered it his mission to share God’s mercy there in the pit of hell on earth. Uncle Carl told me that there was a grief-stricken New York fire captain crawling in the pit, looking for his lost son, a FDNY firefighter. Big Frank took him to the Cross, and prayed. The suffering father found as much comfort as was possible there, in hell.
How many such stories will we never know? Y’all, the people from all over America who came into New York to help us. I ran into Dan Klein, a man from back home in West Feliciana, who drove all the way to Manhattan dragging his big cast-iron smoker, to cook brisket and steaks for the firefighters and construction workers at Ground Zero. I remember sitting on the subway one evening, seeing men with the kind of innocent faces that said we’re not from here, wearing jackets identifying themselves as members of a Southern Baptist relief organization. I silently thanked God for their presence. So much mercy. So much compassion. So much unity.
It couldn’t last (though I did write ages ago about something gorgeous that happened that Christmas near Ground Zero; I think you’ll like it). That feeling was as fine and beautiful as a snowflake, and as evanescent. It melted under the heat of justified rage. For if 9/11 clarified the charity we owed each other, and the preciousness of life, it also made plain as day what America had to do: go to war to punish the people who did this to us. The rage I felt inside was all-consuming.
It still rises from time to time, especially when I see people — academics and journalists, usually — denying what Islam itself had to do with the attack. In 2003, we moved to Dallas, and I took up a writing post at *The Dallas Morning News. *By then, I had read deeply into history and religion, and understood the deep religious roots of 9/11. I began looking around Dallas to see if there were Islamic radicals around. Indeed there were. The Dallas Central Mosque, at the time the biggest mosque in Texas, was mobbed up with the Muslim Brotherhood. I began writing critically about the radicalism some local Islamic leaders were promoting. They raised hell with the paper, but my boss, who had to bear much of their fury, bravely stood by me. She said as long as I could document what I was finding, she would — and she was true to her word.
But this work won me no friends in the newsroom. I wrote about that experience long ago, in this essay. I already knew that most American journalists were liberals. What I did not know until that experience was that many, many of them were so possessed by ideology that they refused to see what was right in front of their faces. To them, the Real Enemies were American conservatives, especially religious conservatives. “Queers For Palestine,” which would come decades later, is especially crazy, but I saw the seeds of the mentality in those years right after 9/11.
I also saw the way ideology had consumed American elites, even conservative ones. President George W. Bush went around saying “Islam is peace.” I get it — he was laudably trying to prevent vigilante attacks on innocent American Muslims. But in retrospect, he seems really to have believed it. Worse, in his second Inaugural Address, he stated with great conviction the lie that many Americans, both on the Left and the Right, tell themselves: that the desire for liberal democracy is universal, and that the United States has a divine mandate to spread it globally.
We have seen our vulnerability, and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny, prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive power and cross the most defended borders and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
Noble words, and noble thoughts. But untrue. The president went on:
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
“Ending tyranny in the world”! Such messianic hubris could only end badly. And indeed it has.
Back to post-9/11 New York. By the next summer, my wife begged me to go to therapy to deal with my all-consuming anger. It wasn’t just 9/11; in January of 2002, the clerical sex abuse scandal exploded like a high-altitude hydrogen bomb over Catholic America, when the Boston case of Father John Geoghan caused journalists from coast to coast to look into whether Catholic dioceses in their own area had gone to similar lengths to conceal the problem (they had). The rock of my emotional life, my Catholic faith, was shaken to the core, and, after three years of intense, painful struggle, eventually collapsed.
(In 2018, when at a Rome conference I heard Archbishop Georg Gänswein, at the time the personal assistant to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, say that the sex abuse scandal was “the Catholic Church’s 9/11,” I knew he was right, because I had lived through both catastrophes.)
A year after the terror attack, on 9/11/2002, I awoke early to walk with a friend from our Brooklyn neighborhood over to Ground Zero, for the one-year commemoration of the attacks. We followed a NYPD bagpipers band. We lost each other in the scrum along the fenced perimeter of the hole. At precisely the moment the first plane hit the north tower one year earlier, a powerful wind came from the north. I know it was at that exact moment, because I was looking at my watch.
The wind was gale force, and it blew all morning. True, there was at that moment a hurricane far offshore in the Atlantic; the wind was from its outermost edge. Still, the timing was uncanny. My wife was w…
