Reflection: September 11, 2001

Where I might have started if this was a memoir with an arc to it

Welcome to an out of sequence reflection or jump forward in this memoir. If you are just joining, this is a standalone read, I think. But it does reference the rest of what I have written, so if you would like to catch up you can enter your email address to subscribe. You will get a welcome email with all past posts in order, and future installments will come directly to your inbox. Mahalo to my readers, new ones and longtime ones, for sticking with my journey.

Like a novel or a theatrical production, a memoir should have an arc to it. A starting point that sets up the characters and plot lines, and an ending point that resolves and makes sense of everything. A meaningful slice of the storyteller’s life rather than a hot mess of random incidents. Another way of structuring a memoir would be to put the dramatic ending at the beginning, and then recount all the events that led up to it.

If I ever make this into an actual book rather than a Substack newsletter, maybe I will write from beginning to end, or maybe I can start at the end once I have found it. It could be this post.

Or maybe the memoir makes sense just as it is. Regardless, right in the middle of 1996 I’m going to take you on a detour to the future, as this story does not want to wait. I wrote a version of this particular story on my Facebook feed on September 11, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of the day two towers of the World Trade Center fell. Most of my Facebook friends had no idea I had worked in lower Manhattan, although those of you who have been reading this memoir know that I worked for a Wall Street bank during the first three years of these stories.

By 2001, I was working as a consultant to Trinity Church Wall Street. I ran a program called Trinity Wall Street Dialogues, an outreach to their neighbors in the financial community in which an invited group of next generation leaders discussed topics of mutual interest. Here is what happened that brought me to Trinity and to lower Manhattan on September 11th.

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Back in NYC in December 1997 - more than a year after I left you hanging in the most recent episode - I was taking over leadership of an educational organization called International Skye. The name was intended to suggest nothing, to protect the privacy of the members - multigenerational families of high net worth. This was the annual meeting at which I would be introduced to the member families for the first time.

In a hotel conference room full of extremely wealthy individuals and their family office managers and art consultants, I was surprised to find myself seated at dinner next to an Episcopal priest. Curious. I asked about his connection to the organization. The surprising answer was heʻd been teaching chaos theory in a program for the younger generation of some of the families. Bouncing in his seat with enthusiasm, the Reverend Fred Burnham explained that he also had a doctorate in the History of Science and that the relational epistemology of the new sciences was the bridge between science and religion.

Huh?

Remember What Happened Before What Happens Happens? My favorite childhood books were A Wrinkle in Time and Four Ways of Being Human. Iʻd taught a college class on Women and Religion and worked on Wall Street. Puzzle pieces fell into place in my head at something nearing the speed of light. "And the bridge to the indigenous worldview," I added in amazement.

Fred giggled in delight. That dinner conversation was the start of a life-changing friendship. A year later he invited me to join his team at Trinity Institute as a consultant to the Trinity Wall Street Dialogues that the Church initiated as part of the year-long celebration of their tercentenary.

Fred loved making connections, between ideas and between people. I do too. And the years we worked together were full of intellectual fun and risks taken and the building of many close relationships that last until today. A family, a compassionate community. One of the reasons I enjoy occasionally indulging in an episode or two of the show Father Brown on Netflix is that the character reminds me so much of Fred. The intellect, the impishness, the zest for life, the capacity to lovingly embrace the most diverse characters, the absolute moral compass.

And that is how we found ourselves together, covered with ashes and dust, on September 11, 2001. That is how, less than two weeks later, Fred invited me to join him for the night shift serving the Ground Zero recovery effort at St Paulʻs Chapel, a nine-month experience which in retrospect was even more life altering.

On the morning of September 11th, before what happened happened, Fred stood grinning in the doorway of my office on the 21st floor of 74 Trinity Place, excited to be introducing me to Rowan Williams - then Archbishop of Wales and rumored to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, a man he described as "the closest thing to a living saint I have met." Then the two of them went several floors down to the Trinity television studio to record a show. The next time I saw them, chaos was more than a theory for all of us.

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The neighborhood as it looks today showing 74 Trinity Place and St Paulʻs Chapel.

They say we all remember where we were when we heard the news on 9-11. I would not know what moment to pinpoint. I "heard the news" in bits and pieces.

I somehow missed the sound of the first plane. What I heard was a big thump and a scream from the office next door, the offices that faced north rather than east down Wall Street as mine did. I thought something had fallen and rushed to the aid of the only person there...to find her pointing at the window, at the flames coming from the North Tower.

The mind could only think "what a horrible accident"...and I went back to my desk to call my 10 am appointment to reschedule. The next news I heard was the sound of an airplane engine too close to the 21st floor. I yelled "There is another one! I have to go!" I slammed down the phone and ran back to the next office to watch the second plane. I could not stop staring as the images continued to unfold. For one instant an airplane-shaped imprint lingered on the South Tower; then flames poured out. Moments later, debris already swirling in the wind, a womanʻs white blouse plastered against the window right in front of where we stood. I wondered who the woman in the blouse had been and said my first prayer of the day.

Next we heard an announcement, instructing everyone to evacuate to the cafeteria on the mezzanine level. A television was quickly set up, and we heard the news that the Pentagon had also been attacked.

And then after a bit, we heard and felt a rumbling like an earthquake. We heard the building manager, an Iraq war veteran, yell "Hit the deck!". And then we heard what sounded like bombing...bump bump bump-bump-bump...as the windows blew out and the black cloud blew in.

We crawled on hands and knees to the sub-basement and there I heard many prayers. The best, offered by a lay person, that those in charge might be guided well in their decisions.

Then we heard someone - a police officer I think - telling us to leave the building and walk towards Battery Park...to try to stay together but that if the ground started shaking again, take cover wherever we could.

The scene to which we emerged made me think of the movie Independence Day and the story in my mind was that the entire Eastern Seaboard was gone. It was 100 miles to my home in Litchfield County, Connecticut, and I figured it would take me three days to walk. I regretted leaving my running shoes under my desk. I was glad to be living in farm country where it was harvest season. I figured I had a skill to barter as people would need transportation and I was good with horses.

And then we heard and felt the rumbling again. I plastered myself against a building. Calling on skills learned in a decade of meditation and studying the Tibetan practices for awareness at the moment of death, along with Velvalee’s training in "holding the frequency", I focused on my breath with an eerie calm, noting not dead yet, not dead yet, not dead yet as the wall of smoke, ash and debris rushed at us.

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Slowly I heard voices again calling "Trinity, Trinity" trying to keep our group together. We found our way through the thick darkness and incomprehensible rubble of papers and shoes and ash and more ash, until reaching Battery Park I saw the most surprising thing of all: the sun was still shining and the Statue of Liberty still stood.

I learned the ones who take charge on days like these are rarely the official leaders. It was the survivors who knew how to respond in a crisis: the veterans and the mothers. Angelica, our Trinity Institute administrative assistant, had a group of executives and priests following her like imprinted ducklings. The one missing was Fred - our boss/client/dearest friend. We were worried about his heart condition and adult-onset asthma. Angie said she had the others in hand and would get them on a ferry, so I said Iʻd go look for Fred.

How do you look for someone amid chaos? Here is where the story returns again to the events about which I have been writing. As I had learned to do traveling with Velvalee, I silenced my analytical mind and invoked my intuition. My gaze was drawn to a bus idling on the street. I sprinted towards it and motioned to the driver to open the door. Looking inside, I breathed a sigh of relief. Fred, our colleague Courtney Cowart, and Archbishop Rowan Williams were in the front row of the bus. I hopped on. The driver took the bus across the tip of Manhattan and then north along the East River Drive, crawling through crowds leaving lower Manhattan on foot. From the elevated drive we looked back at where the towers had stood and for the first time I understood they were gone.

Thatʻs how I heard the news.

And at a time when the unthinkable, unimaginable, not to be planned for, collectively life threatening thing happened, I realized with gratitude the magnitude of what the years about which Iʻm writing in this memoir had prepared me to navigate. It was not my Ph.D. nor my business skills that mattered that day, nor would they have been any use to me if all the buildings and infrastructure in the City had actually been taken out. If life asked me to choose between these two worlds, I knew now which one was essential. But my job, as it turns out, my personal legend, my reason for being here, was and continues to be to bridge these worlds into a better future for all of us.