The Beginning of Faith

On the 25th anniversary of September 11

It was described in The New York Times as “a puzzling mixture of everyday piety and murderous resolve.” Austere Muslim scholars pored over it, professing bafflement. So much of it was taken up simply with instructions for prayer. Prayer in the night before. Prayer in the morning. Prayer in the taxi. Prayer in the airport. Prayer without ceasing.

“Bless your body with some verses of the Qur’an,” it also instructed, to be done by reading verses into one’s hands and then touching everything — “the luggage, clothes, the knife, your personal effects, your ID, your passport, and all of your papers.” The knife was to be given a final check, the blade sharpened, for “you must not discomfort your animal during the slaughter.”

And on boarding the plane, the last prayer: “Oh God, open all doors for me. Oh God who answers prayers and answers those who ask you, I am asking you for your help. I am asking you for forgiveness. I am asking you to lighten my way. I am asking you to lift the burden I feel. God, I trust in you. God, I lay myself in your hands.”

The austere scholars shook their heads over the letter found in the suitcase. No good Muslim would do this. No good Muslim would pray such prayers before doing such things. It was not the way of peace. It was not the way of Islam.

Filled with anger, a young American neuroscience student began to write an essay. The essay became the first chapter in a book. The book became several books, and the several books became a publishing phenomenon. The student was Sam Harris, and the book was The End of Faith.

The thesis was straightforward: Religion gave us September 11. Religion drove the young hijackers step by suicidal step. Religion sharpened their knives for the ritual slaughter. Meanwhile, in our complacency, the West slept, dreaming of the broad sunlit uplands of enlightened reason. We believed the world was following us there. We were wrong. And now we were awake.

The pluralistic gospel of religious tolerance was impotent, Harris argued. It was the moderate’s cop-out, keeping the fundamentalists at a distance while allowing them their space in the public square. That was no longer enough. Nor was it enough to focus solely on a religion, though he admitted it would not have been rational to conjecture that the hijackers were Catholics, Amish, or Mormons. It was religion, all religion, that had to be exposed, debunked, laughed out of court. All unreasoned dogmas, all superstitious talk of prayer and sacrifice and whispered blessings. All talk of holy things—holy crackers, holy water, holy mother of God. All words like “God” and “Allah.” These words, Harris insisted, “must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal,’ or they will unmake our world.”

Some version of Jesus might be saved out of this demolition project. A Sermon on the Mount Jesus who taught people to be kind and ruffled the religious leaders’ feathers and got killed for his troubles. A neat set of empirical claims linking ethics and spiritual insight. Just not Jesus Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to come back on the clouds of heaven. And certainly not Jesus dying on a cross for our sins, that barbaric and gruesome fairytale.

There are, of course, needs which religion addresses, however high and terrible the price. There is even, dare we say, “a sacred dimension to our existence,” a dimension we must all come to terms with. But for this test, no reliance on “untestable propositions” is required.

Imagine this, Harris invites the reader: Imagine that we wake up tomorrow and find that all human knowledge has disappeared. The books and computers containing them are still here, but we can’t read them. We have forgotten how to do the most basic things. What would we need to remember? Surely, the first things to remember would be how to grow food, how to use our machines, how to speak and read and write. But “in this process of reclaiming our humanity,” when, Harris asks, would we need to remember “that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected?”

Fairytale Jesus would be of no use to us then. Indeed, he is of no use to us now. Fairytale Jesus is unattainable. There is no hope of us becoming like him. With such an unreachable goal, “One can only enumerate one’s sins, believe the unbelievable, and await the end of the world.”

*

September 11 was, in its way, the end of a world—of a nation’s innocence, of its way of life. And it was the end of many thousands of small worlds. 2,977 lives, each life a world. For some the end came in seconds, for others in minutes. For some, the minutes stretching towards an hour as all false hope bled away.

In those minutes, many desperately tried to call loved ones, and some succeeded. You should read this account collecting them in one place, if you can. You should know names like Edmund McNally, calling his wife to let her know he loves her, to calmly remind her of his life insurance policies, then calling her a second time to let her know, sheepishly, that he had booked a trip to Rome to surprise her for her 40th birthday. “Liz, you’ll have to cancel that.”

You should know names like Edgar Emery, who worked in human resources on the 90th floor of Tower Two and immediately ushered five women on his team down and out of the building as soon as he saw Tower One on fire. Another group passed him on their way down as he was on his way back up. He told them to go on without him. You should know the name of Emery’s female colleague, Alayne Gentul—Bible school teacher, wife and mother, director of human resources, determined to get her people out. Together, they climbed seven floors above their offices to the six people left on floor 97, and there they would all become trapped above the impact of the second plane. “Can you get out?” his wife asked on their last call. “I don’t know,” he said. “I love you.” In the background, she could hear Gentul screaming, “Where’s the stairs? Where’s the stairs?” When Gentul made her last call to her husband, Emery was in the background trying to get the sprinkler going, hitting it with a shoe.

Alayne Gentul’s religious affiliation is publicly known. So far as I can tell, Edgar Emery’s is not. Perhaps he had no such affiliation. On that day, faith was not a necessary condition of virtue, or stoic calm, or great valor. But it was a day marked by the signs and symbols of faith. And by the prayers. Prayers spoken and unspoken, whispered and screamed. Prayers of petition, of despair, of angry hope. Prayers of the faithful, and of those who cried out to what God they knew not. Prayers answered and unanswered.

The prayers of Melissa Doi, heard on her last desperate voicemail from the burning South Tower, muttering “Holy Mary, mother of God.” The dispatcher repeatedly tells her to be calm, that someone is coming, that she’s documenting everything. “I’m gonna die, aren’t I?” Melissa asks. “Please God…” The dispatcher tells her to say her prayers, and she can be heard reciting “Our Father.”

The prayers of Genelle Guzman, buried but alive in the rubble of the North Tower, pleading with God, bargaining. If she had to die, could she at least see her daughter one last time? Or if she died here, could they at least find her body? As time passed, her prayers grew bolder. She wanted to live. She demanded a miracle. Meanwhile, her family presumed her dead. “They were sad at night,” Guzman says, “and the joy waited until the morning.”

The prayers of John and Michele Cartier, brother and sister barely escaping the South Tower together before collapse, racing to John’s soot-covered motorcycle to escape the devastation. “I hope this damn thing starts. Please God, start.” It started. Then as they rode, praying that their brother James had lived. He died.

The prayers of Fr. Mychal Judge, the firemen’s chaplain, who entered the Towers with them and was seen clutching a rosary with his face white as a sheet, praying, “Lord Jesus, end this! God, end this right now!” When the South Tower fell, a piece of debris caught him in the head. They carried his body into St. Peter’s and laid him in front of the altar. His death certificate was marked with a “1.”

The prayers of Detective David Brink, NYPD, covered head to toe in dust, stumbling down the street with eyes crusted shut by bits of glass and debris. At the altar of St. Paul’s, where he and his surviving friends had taken refuge, he knelt and gave thanks, prayed for strength, prayed for the souls of his lost friends. Then he washed his eyes in holy water. Groping for some cloth to wipe his face, he found the linen closet and pulled out the white cloth that covers the chalice, white with a cross stitched in red. Looking up, he saw that the priest had come out and began to stutter an apology. “No, my son,” the priest said. “That’s what they’re supposed to be used for.”

The prayers of Ron Clifford and blind Jennieann Maffeo, blind because her eyes had been burnt shut, crying out for Jesus and Mary as she huddled close to the Irish businessman who had guided her out of Tower One. “Are you Catholic?” Clifford asked her. “Yes,” she said, and he said, “Let’s say the Lord’s Prayer.” So they prayed, even as the second plane hit, even as Clifford’s sister and her little daughter were on that plane dying. Maffeo was so burnt, he remembers how the crowds parted like the Red Sea for them. “You’re going to make it,” he whispered as they laid her on the stretcher. “You have to make it, after all we’ve been through.” But she would not make it. At the hospital, her Italian father embraced him with kisses and broken English.

On Flight 93, Tom Burnett managed to call his wife. He had been a college atheist, but in the last few years he had become a devout Catholic. On the phone, he explained the plan. That they were waiting until the plane was over a rural area. That nobody was coming to save them. That he thought they could do it. “What do you want me to do?” she asked him. “What can I do?” “Pray,” he said. “Just pray.” She prayed, and before the last charge so did they, reciting the Our Father and Psalm 23. Prayer against prayer. Holy writ against holy writ.

*

On that day, the smallest things determined who lived and who died, the most random things. “Monday night football saved my life,” said one young man on the phone, explaining to his mother that he had slept in and was late to work. “Thank God for petty partisan politics,” wrote a journalist who had stopped on the way to vote in the mayoral primary. Over breakfast, a sales rep had just received a gift from a colleague, an artistic tie that didn’t match his green shirt, so he went back to the Marriott Hotel between the Towers to iron his white one. He survived. His colleague did not. A broker survived because he went downstairs to help check in a client who had forgotten his driver’s license. He would have sent his assistant down, but she was eight and a half months pregnant, and he didn’t want to make her walk all that way. He survived. She did not. No one else on that floor did.

People doomed themselves by stopping to save others. Sometimes, people saved themselves by stopping, as in the awe-inspiring story retold as “the miracle of Stairwell B,” where the firemen of Ladder 6 survived the collapse by stopping to help Josephine Harris, then pausing with her when her legs gave out in precisely the one location where they would be sheltered as the building came down.

For journalist Garrett Graff, whose task was to collect all of these stories, it was unbearable. The randomness was unbearable. For him, it was the end of faith.

Then there were the people who jumped. Or fell. Or were blown out. Whatever story you preferred to tell. But if you were there, you knew. Two teenage sisters watched from a window, making a home movie, their voices shaking. “Oh my God, don’t be a person,” said one. “I mean, who’s to say it’s not a chair?” said the other. “Please be a chair. Please be a chair.”

Chief Joseph Pfeifer tried to get a message to them over the building’s PA system, “Please don’t jump! We’re coming to you!” But the lines were cut. All he could do was watch. The oldest fireman on site, 71-year-old William M. Feehan, chased away a man with a camera, shouting “Don’t you have any human decency?” Pfeifer would live. Feehan would die.

William Jimeno, PAPD, remembers one of the jumpers to this day: a blond man in khakis and a light pink collared shirt. “When he jumped, he jumped almost like he was on a cross, like Jesus.”

I think of them as I listen to Sam Harris give a lecture on death and the present moment. Atheists have a really good reason to make the most of the present moment, he explains, unlike religious people, who think they have all the time in this life and the next. Religious people worry whether questions like “What is the point of life?” and “Is anything sacred?” make any sense otherwise, but Harris thinks they do. And he thinks there are answers. All it takes is a certain change in mindset. With apologies to his atheist audience for springing Buddhism onto them, he leads them through a guided meditation. Take a few deep breaths and just let gravity settle you in your seat. And you can let your breath just come and go naturally. Become aware of this sensation of sitting. Feel the weight of your body. Feel the weight of your arms and shoulders.

In the last minutes of Q & A, an Indian woman says she has lately been experiencing a deepened appreciation for the value and dignity of life, but now she has a problem: She feels too much. Whenever she hears of a life lost by malice or supreme negligence, she feels sad and angry. Before, she would feel detached. Oh well, accidents happen. Now the full weight of grief and injustice lies heavy on her. “I can see the responsibility of other people, that others are being robbed of their right to live.” How do atheists like her deal with this?

Well, Harris answers, once again it’s all about that mindset shift. To suffer is to perseverate on the suffering. Concentrating on the Now can help. If you “sink into the present moment” for long enough, you will find it “sacred.” You just need to clear away all the religious bullshit to get there.

I think about the jumpers. I think about what they were thinking, in those last ten seconds. It was reported that some were holding hands. Some made the sign of the cross.

Feel the weight of your body. Feel the weight of your arms and shoulders. Become aware of this sensation of falling.

Please God please God please…

There’s no need to control the breath. Just let it come and go.

God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry…

If a thought intrudes, hold it for a moment, then gently guide your attention back to sensations.

JESUS!

*

As the South Tower was coming down, a young Indian Christian named Sujo John called out Jesus’ name. He had somehow made it all the way out of Tower One, even though he had wasted precious minutes reentering to try to place frantic phone calls to his pregnant wife, who worked in Tower Two. At the collapsing wall, he huddled together with fifteen or twenty other people. He asked them to call on Jesus’ name with him. He would never have imagined a moment like this the day before, living his quiet New York “closet Christian” life, going to church on Sunday, then on Monday speaking of Jesus only in lowered tones with his few other believing colleagues. But in that moment, he told them to call on the Name, and all of them did, their voices drowned out by the roar.

Then they were separated, and John found himself face down in the ashes, praying something soft would fall on him. When he realized he had survived and looked back, he saw their crushed bodies.

Another nearby man was also stirring. They reached out for each other. The other man was Special Agent Lenny Hatton, who had been on his way to work for the FBI that morning when he saw the first tower on fire. In former lives, he was a volunteer fireman, a Marine, and a bomb tech. Wild horses couldn’t have kept him from the scene. He’d climbed to the top of the Marriott Hotel and relayed information back to the Bureau’s New York office. When the second tower was struck, he’d raced down to assist with evacuations.

John would learn all of this later, but for now, all he knew was that the man said he was with the FBI. “Do you know Jesus?” John asked him. Hatton said yes. They took hands and said what they assumed would be their last prayers. Hatton no doubt was thinking of his own wife and four children, of the daughter whose school dance he would fly thirty-three straight hours from overseas to attend. When they opened their eyes, John looked up and suddenly noticed a flashing red ambulance light. As they crawled towards it, they could see that the vehicle was crushed, but the light was still blinking, guiding them all the way out to the street.

There Hatton let go of John’s hand and said goodbye. “I have to go back and get more people.” Then he ran back into the North Tower. It was the last time John ever saw him. He would later work with the FBI to help them confirm that Hatton had died in the second collapse.

That day John continued wandering the streets in despair. A journalist put a microphone in his face and asked how he was. “My wife is dead,” John said. He stumbled into a TV store and met a frightened Israeli girl who worked there. She picked glass out of his hair, gave him a cup of water. “I’m afraid they’re going to bomb my city now,” she said. Still, even in her fear she thought of him, asked if she could call his family. “What family?” he said. “My wife is dead.” Just as she took his phone, it rang. It was his wife. His wife, who had been delayed for work by five minutes, who watched the North Tower on fire and thought he was dead. A Christian woman she didn’t know had guided her to an apartment, sat down and comforted her with Scripture.

John went on to become a motivational speaker, and in 2010, he would found a global ministry to rescue trafficked women. But he never forgot the firemen, the men running up as he was running down. And he never forgot Lenny Hatton, the man who ran back in.

*

In the days after that day, construction worker Frank Silecchia described Ground Zero as hell on earth, a wasteland of fire, smoke and ash. And over and under all, the smell. Silecchia would dip a bandana in water and wrap it around his face. But nothing could keep out that smell. Every day, men went to work there, and every day they came home and said nothing. Some could hardly even embrace their wives. They just sat, and stared, and said nothing.

Searching through building six, flattened in the fall of Tower One, Silecchia and six firemen spray-painted orange Xs to mark their path back. After twelve hours, they’d found three bodies. Silecchia picked his way towards what was left of the lobby atrium. Peering inside, into something like a grotto illuminated in pale dawn, he found them: the steel crosses. Four of them. One loomed larger than the others, about twenty feet high.

In the morning silence, Silecchia fell to his knees and wept.