A Ground Zero of Love: 25 Years After the Towers Fell

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I’m walking through a home inspection, just after 9 am, our 9-month-old baby boy slung up on my hip, his pudgy hand gripping. pulling, tugging, at the collar of my t-shirt, the moment the towers came down.

Inspect all you want, check the floors, the trusses, the roof, but no home in the world felt safe the morning of 9/11.

When you’re facing what truly feels like the end of the world, what you need is true friends in the world.

More than 200 floors fall away, give way, and fathers with flapping ties and mothers in patent pumps, with hearts exploding with love, jumped and fell away, and when the world explodes into plume of smoke, a ball of flame, when it feels like the end of the world on a clear-skied Tuesday morning, where in the world is a safe place for any of us to turn, a safe place for anyone to land?

When the world’s falling away, all there is to fall into is the arms of God and Love. And into the kindness of strangers who jump to your aid, the courage of responders who don’t hesitate to run straight toward the open jaws of evil that are at your heels, the whole world who stands to be your friend, so you aren’t alone to face what seems like the end.

When you’re facing what truly feels like the end of the world, what you need is true friends in the world.

With hundreds of flights still in airspace all over North America and the Pacific, and no one knowing which flight might turn into the next terrorist missile or who might be aboard any of those planes, Canadian neighbors offer to be a soft place to land for 224 planes and more than 33,000 displaced passengers.

The small Canadian town of Gander, Newfoundland, population 9,651, welcomed 6,656 people from nearly 95 countries and Canadian “Newfoundlanders being Newfoundlanders…they just took them into their homes.” For five days, Canadian neighbors served around the clock, local pharmacists filling out prescriptions for free. Beulah Cooper, a Royal Canadian Legion volunteer whose own son was a firefighter, took Hannah O’Rourke into her home and keeps Hannah going – showers, drives around town, sitting outside with a glass of wine — through five days of not knowing whether Hannah’s NYC firefighter son, Kevin, was alive or not. The devastating word came only after Hannah finally reached New York: Kevin had laid down his life to help those trapped in the North Tower. And in her shattering grief, Hannah picked up her phone and called Beulah.

Guy Gullick, pilot of US Airways Flight 3 from Rome to Philadelphia, said Canadian hotel worker Susan Scharpegge worked around the clock and “slept on the floor” of the hotel “while we had rooms. You showed the world what kindness, compassion and humanity looks like,” said Gullick. “You’re an example for the world, and the world needs that right now.”

If fierce Love for each other’s humanity isn’t our ground zero, then can anything ultimately stand?

830 NATO personnel from 13 NATO countries took to the skies on more than 360 sorties, and nearly 4,300 hours, in Operation Eagle Assist to patrol and defend American airspace.

A Mexican Topos rescue team travelled to New York and their American neighbors to help any way they could.

A FEMA photographer at Ground Zero captures an image of a member of the French search-and-rescue team with his Alsatian search dogs, working through the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center.

In Enoosaen, Kenya, elders of the Maasai tribe, in their red robes, dedicate 14 cattle, representing comfort in grief, to the American people.

In the 8 days after the towers fall, thousands of Canadians line up across the country, to give some 37,000 units of blood — twice the normal amount – in an attempt to give whatever they can to help their American neighbors.

Inspect the old home of this World, 25 years on now after the Twin Towers fell, and does this old world have a roof of Love that dares to still hold, any strong beams of global kindness and grace, any sure floor of generosity and hospitality — or are we somehow the ones who have fallen into harshness, sad coldness, guarded distance?

Inspect the home of this old earth, inspect the hearts and the words and the deeds and the grace and do the trusses of our brotherliness still span this one and only home of earth that we all together share?

No matter what else monstrously falls – there’s always some way for the mere kindness of people to hold, if we choose to hold on to the miraculous humanity of all people.

Because when we face what feels like the end, what we’re all going to need is true friends — and to be a true friend.

“For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods,” the wisdom of Aristotle quietly offers.

If fierce Love for each other’s humanity isn’t our ground zero, then can anything ultimately stand?

No matter what else monstrously falls – there’s always some way for the mere kindness of people to hold, if we choose to hold on to the miraculous humanity of all people.

On the morning that’s now 25 years on, I stand at the window of this house that eventually passed inspection, looking out across the fields, to the sun rising yet again.

The roof of Love still holds, as long as our hands and hopes still do.