Psalm 27

The morning of September 11, 2001 started off as a blue and sunny day, but that all changed when the news announcements commenced to erupt on the radio as I drove to work. We all know what happened. Two hijacked planes struck the towers of the World Trade Center, and a third had struck The Pentagon. A fourth plane had been hijacked too, but at that time the whereabouts, or whether or not the plane had crashed, was still unconfirmed. I felt terror and confusion. Wasn't that the intent of terrorist acts, along with destruction of American lives and the centers of our military and financial institutions? The news was understandably frenzied, chaotic. I had worked in the towers several times for a couple of clients and also had spent more time there when I passed through them on my way to do a job in one of the New York City government offices. I often would eat lunch out front and gaze up at the dizzying height. The last time I had been in the towers was March 2000. I thought of the people who worked there and wondered if they were okay, or even alive. By the time I arrived at the office the radio announced that all US flights had been grounded.

At first the mood at work appeared to be like most any other day---somber and a bit dull. The office had a printer and copier room and a woman, the administrator of this room, was the only person visibly shaken and emotional about the attacks. She had set up a TV in the room and as fellow employees (nearly all middle-aged males like me) came into pick up their printouts, some one would stop and watch the TV for a few minutes and discuss the horror, or ask the woman questions as if she were an interpreter or a chorus for the unfolding tragedy. Incredibly, the first tower had collapsed, had fallen. It didn't seem possible. As much as I wanted to follow the news, I had a conference call with a customer and project team that I was hosting so I returned to my cubicle.

The call was miserable and disheartening. I was shocked by the attitudes of the attendees---mid-Westerners, or northern mid-Westerners---who said, "It must be really hard for you guys out there," as if the attacks were somehow only about New York, or at worst the East Coast, and not an attack against the United States, as if these smug, bland, bourgeois inhabitants of the nation's interior felt themselves safely insulated from the unraveling nightmare . . .  and maybe they were. I think their intention may have been to sound polite and sympathetic, but I frankly felt ashamed of them as compatriots, fellow countrymen, in the context of what was happening. Then, from the printer room, I heard the administrator's voice, a scream "Oh, no! The other one is falling!" Her voice sounded closer to a protracted moan than a scream as if she'd been wounded. I wrapped up the call and entered the printer room where a small group had gathered around the TV to watch the collapsing towers (hushed words, heads shaking in disbelief), the screen filled with smoke and firefighters and medics and other emergency responders and people fleeing the scene on foot and others injured or dead. A scene of unremitting chaos, tragedy, horror, and a collective depression worse than anything I'd seen in years. I decided I was done working for the day and left the office.

I drove home to check on the kids but no one was there. They entered the house a few minutes later having been let out of school. They were trying to process what had happened. My oldest son, age 14, talked about the time a year or two ago when he'd taken a class trip to New York and he and his teacher and classmates rode the elevator to the top of the World Trade Center. We had the television turned on for further reports.

 My wife arrived home around noon. We ate lunch and afterwards I drove to the nearest Red Cross center to donate blood. I'd been pondering the best act I could undertake during this crisis and donating blood felt more important to me than it ever had before. But when I reached the donation center the line was already a block long, and almost as soon as I joined the end of the line a Red Cross official came out of the building and informed everyone in the queue that they would not be accepting any more donors for the rest of the day and possibly the next day. I was slightly crestfallen. I'd wanted to donate blood, to make some small difference, but I understood the American Red Cross had much to deal with and were vitally competent in times of disaster and emergency throughout much of the world. I had to be consoled by the thought that I had tried.

As I walked back to my car a woman approached me, holding a bible and a card. Normally I would have refused to engage with these people or grant them the slightest opening because their intention was to convert you, to make you "born again." And yet because of the day, the moment, I stopped to hear the woman out. Surprisingly she did not try to convert me at all, no hard-sell or browbeating me into accepting Jesus as my personal savior. Instead she handed me the card which turned out to have a calendar on the back of it for the year 2001. The front of the card displayed an air-brushed illustration, a very characteristic alpine scene meant to bring comfort, and in script the line: The Lord is the strength of my life. Psalm 27 1:b. The full text of verse 1 is: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?  Given the day, the situation, the moment, I was profoundly moved by her gesture and thanked her. She had no further business with me and continued moving down the line to hand her cards out to others in need of a pause, time out, in need of balm.

Later, in the evening, I was startled by the silence, the absence of airplanes, because I lived beneath a flight route and was accustomed to planes overhead all the time. There was no air traffic anywhere and very little automobile traffic. The world had grown still and grieving, the night quieter than Christmas. I checked a 911 website for the names of the people I had worked for in both towers. Luckily they had survived.

I still have that card the woman gave me, a bookmark on Psalm 27 in my King James Bible.