I was rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Stamford, CT when the planes slammed into the towers in New York City on September 11. It was an extraordinary day: blue sky, bright sun, perfect fall weather. I was chairing an early morning board meeting for the local pastoral counseling center. I didn’t have a cell phone, but some of the other board members did. When the first call came in, we thought it was a light plane that had crashed into the first tower; it wasn’t clear that it was an attack. As the calls kept coming, the horror became clear.
I returned to the church, which was normally kept open during daylight hours, and I sat in the sanctuary and prayed. At one point, a pastor associated with the local council of churches came in and asked if I would go with a group of clergy to the Swiss Bank. At that time, the Swiss Bank’s trading floor in Stamford was the largest in the world, and they were sending out a call for help to the local clergy because they had lost so many colleagues in the World Trade Center. I decided that I needed to stay at the church at least until our scheduled noonday prayers. We did have a larger than normal attendance for noon prayers, perhaps ten people mostly from the parish. I read the Great Litany. Later in the day when my associate was available to be present in the church, I did go down to the Swiss Bank, and I was given an office where I saw people who wanted to speak with a counselor.
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