A New Yorker’s prayers: Then and now

There was nothing particularly unusual going on in my life, but that Monday evening, September 10, 2001, I could find peace only by curling up with my Bible and Science and Health and turning to God in prayer about everything I could think of. My prayers were focused on God’s presence and supremacy, divine Love’s government over all. After three hours, I went to bed still feeling uneasy, but reasoning I had done all I could. 

Around 10 AM the next morning, I began making phone calls for work but couldn’t get a connection. Annoyed, I called the operator who flatly informed me that we’d been attacked and to turn on the TV. Every station was replaying the collapse of the Twin Towers and reporting on the other attacks on the Pentagon and in the skies over Pennsylvania. Stunned, my husband and I watched. Then, a deep horror began to rise up within me like a tsunami. Our son earned extra money proofreading legal documents and he had been booked for an all-nighter at a law firm in one of the Towers. He wasn’t home yet. 

“Oh Father,” I mentally wailed, “If only I had known, my prayers could have been more specific.” I pulled away from the images and looked out our window. What I saw was so startling it lifted my thoughts right out of that sinking fear. 

We live above a busy commercial avenue, yet hovering over the trucks, buses, and fumes was a tiny hummingbird. It was looking right at me. We stared at each other and a variation of a passage from Zephaniah spoke to me, “There I am in the midst of thee” (see 3:17). Here was a beautiful symbol. In the middle of the worst imaginable disaster, the Christ-message of healing was insisting that pure unassailable divine Love was the only reality. My fear receded instantly. I felt all was well with our son and didn’t speculate. About 45 minutes later, the phone rang and it was our son. He was safe and walking home. As it turned out, he had been rebooked that night, to a law firm up in midtown, but because he had jury duty the next morning across from the World Trade Center, he planned to get breakfast at a Krispy Kreme shop in the basement level of the Towers beforehand. However, he said, the morning was so beautiful, he settled for a bagel and a half hour of sunshine at Columbus Circle before heading downtown. When he got off the train under the Twin Towers, the second plane had just hit. He reached the sidewalk, watched and prayed until both buildings began to crumble and then ran, helping others get out of the way.

His experience was not unique. Many people who worked in the Twin Towers didn’t get to work on time or at all that day. While the loss of thousands of lives is unspeakably tragic, it is truly remarkable that more were not lost. 

Ten years later, many people are still trying to run out from under the shadow of that day and other tragic days since then. For many there is a sense of loss of innocence, a loss of confidence, security, freedom. Here in Manhattan, heavily armed soldiers in train stations, police on subways with bomb-sniffing dogs, barricades in front of banks, public buildings, synagogues are constant reminders of 9/11 and reinforce wariness. People are more apt to notice when a plane flies lower than usual or takes a different pattern. Many pay closer attention to their intuition like an early warning system. Certainly the Bible says, “Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left” (Isa. 30:21). But God doesn’t speak to us through fear.

As Second Timothy says, “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (1:7). For example, it wasn’t a singular sensitivity to evil that protected Paul from angry mobs, assassins, violent weather, snakes, but his alert, steadfast spiritual perception of Love’s onliness, ever-presence, and supreme authority. Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, explains: “It is Truth’s knowledge of its own infinitude which forbids the genuine existence of even a claim to error. This knowledge is light wherein there is no darkness,—not light holding darkness within itself” (No and Yes, p. 30). And “Disbelief in error destroys error, and leads to the discernment of Truth” (Science and Health, p. 346). So do we ignore uneasy feelings? No. We address them. 

That night before the events of 9/11, when I reached out to God in prayer, I wasn’t scared, but I certainly felt something “knocking on the door” of my thought that I didn’t like. I turned to God for pure healthy thoughts with which to reject the bad. Kind of like refusing to eat a plate of garbage. I knew it wouldn’t be helpful to brood or speculate, allowing fear to rise to mythic proportions (like toying with the garbage) or naively ignore those feelings while they festered. Actively, I climbed into “the secret place of the most High” (Ps. 91:1), seeking holy thoughts and loving them. Although I didn’t know the particular “looms of crime” at work (Science and Health, p. 102), I believe my protesting prayer helped protect my son and possibly others. If you strike a match in a big dark room full of people, more than one person will be illuminated. Mary Baker Eddy offers this explanation: “Good thoughts are an impervious armor; clad therewith you are completely shielded from the attacks of error of every sort. And not only yourselves are safe, but all whom your thoughts rest upon are thereby benefited” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 210). 

New Yorkers are “boots on the ground” adaptable, respecting each other’s private space and learning to understand each other. 

One inspiring response in the wake of terrorism, a response I’ve observed in New York and across the globe for the past ten years, has been an almost universal refusal to change one’s principles. While there is more alertness, a steady level of tolerance, brotherly love, and forgiveness remains. And in Manhattan perhaps by necessity. Over eight million people live on the island, so it’s hard to be isolated. Whether walking through our multicultural neighborhoods, squeezing into crowded subways, or inching down Park Avenue in a taxicab, New Yorkers of all stripes are “boots on the ground” adaptable, respecting each other’s private space and learning to understand each other. 

For instance, after 9/11, some Arab American shop owners, certain the American spirit had been destroyed by the attack, were stunned to see New York women shopping in their stores a week later. Many local civic and church groups searched their religious and cultural histories and reached out to Muslims to explain their own faith. A small Persian restaurant, which opened on the heels of 9/11, sat empty many months. But today it thrives; the food won customers over. 

What apparently outweighs all else for many New Yorkers is excellence. Value is placed more on how well one does something, rather than pedigree, culture, or even politics. So while speed bumps remain as mosques are built, zoning laws change, and memorials honoring those who lost their lives are built and dedicated, we continue to learn to be a community. Baby step by baby step, many here are learning to “turn the other cheek,” “walk the second mile,” and so discover greater inner reserves of patience, strength, and goodness while pursuing their goals. 

Jesus, whom I consider the most successful mediator ever, left a blueprint for a good society: the Sermon on the Mount (see Matt. chaps. 5–7), wherein lies the ultimate weapon of defense, spiritual love. His own expression of this love not only protected Jesus from evil, but so “unglued” human hate that, when he “yielded up the ghost,” the Temple curtain ripped in half and the earth trembled (see Matt 27:50, 51). Three days later, the boulder sealing him in the tomb rolled away and he rose. His resurrection proved for all time that man is forever loved, immortal, the unassailable idea of God, never severed from Life. 

So where to go from here? Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health, “Each successive stage of experience unfolds new views of divine goodness and love” (p. 66). Why is this true? Because God never abandons us and each of us is endowed with dominion (see Gen. 1:26). A crisis implies that good disappeared. But the 23rd Psalm disproves this belief, showing that God, infinite Love, remains firmly at our side through thick and thin, providing us with so much wisdom, peace, hope, courage that our “cup runneth over.” Then we begin to recognize ourselves as God’s likeness, recognize that God’s laws, “rod and staff,” constitute our very being. And “goodness and mercy,” like bright-eyed sheep dogs, herd every faltering thought back to Truth until we see that neither we, nor our loved ones, are ever outside the consciousness of God. 

Here is a glorious reminder to hold to as we go forward: “There is no fear in love [dread does not exist], but full-grown (complete, perfect) love turns fear out of doors and expels every trace of terror!” (I John 4:18, Amplified Bible).

For a long while after 9/11, I found great solace gazing at the city skyline from the north end of the reservoir in Central Park. There the sky cups Manhattan from east to west and it’s quiet. I love thinking of how God holds this dear city in His powerful hands, guarding, nourishing, developing all that is good in it forever.