9/11 Remembered: Offering Faith in a Time of Chaos

A man leans against the wall in a haze of dust and darkness, a stench haunting the air along with the sound of his lonely saxophone on a New York City street.

Jan Fisher knew he had lost someone. That sound. That soul. The towers and lives lost in a cloud of dust and destruction.

“That was his memorial—his tribute,” she said. “Or, his hope, that almost like they would find the sound of the horn and it would bring them back.”

The memories now remain with Fisher, who lived in New York on the day two planes hit the World Trade Center, leaving the country and the world forever changed.

Now an resident and married to , she recently recalled the day and the weeks that followed as she worked at a place where many people sought peace, love and some kind of comfort—church.

A member of a ministry team who majored in English, Fisher worked a variety of jobs while in New York, including feature writing and working as a copy editor for an advertising agency. She also worked part-time at Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village near Second Avenue, about two miles away from Ground Zero.

“One morning, as was my custom, I got up and turned on New York One, which is really 24-hour news that’s local,” she said. “I was getting ready and I was frozen in front of the TV as they showed the Twin Towers in that moment.”

She saw the instant replay of the plane hitting the first tower and couldn’t believe it. She was confused, afraid and kept her eyes on the screen.

“While I was watching, I saw the other plane hit the other tower live, and I almost threw up,” she said. “I can’t describe the feeling—you are horror-filled when you realize that this is actually happening.”

Suddenly, she was aware that she heard a myriad of sirens. She grabbed her purse and ran down Second Avenue to the church, where she found everyone in shock. Immediately, meetings were cancelled and the sanctuary doors were opened to the public.

“You couldn’t even imagine at that point the enormity of what this event was going to be,” she said. “All we knew was there was catastrophe, people were killed immediately, and we needed to open the doors of the church so people could pray.”

As they followed the news throughout the morning, within the first hour, people started coming to the church. Staff, members and neighborhood volunteers arrived, with people standing outside inviting others inside. Boxes of Kleenex were brought in while others who had been on their way to work late turned around and came back.

“I remember one woman was sobbing and I was just holding her, and she was a stranger but no one is a stranger when something like this happens,” Fisher said. “She had very long, curly hair and obviously had just taken a shower and was late—you knew she was a little off schedule—and she said, ‘On my usual schedule, I would have been in that building.’”

Church staff quickly bought food, water and other drinks to make sandwiches for people who came seeking solace. Later in the morning, people who had been at the site of the World Trade Center were making their way up Second Avenue, covered in white.

The sky was a deep, dark blue, in a gigantic cloud of grey over the city.

“When the towers fell, we were speechless,” she said. “No one ever thought those towers would be that vulnerable.”

Fisher later discovered that her dear friend, Michael, had died in the World Trade Center that day. He had recently taken a new job at a bank. His last voice messages to his friends and family haunt her still.

“He was a fantastic person and a wonderful dad,” Fisher said. “One of the messages, he said, ‘We don’t know quite what is happening, but it’s too far to go downstairs—we are going to the roof and maybe they will send helicopters for us,’ and that was the last message.”

In the following weeks, the church offered counseling and psychological services that all were volunteered pro bono to people who were looking for help.

“That went on for a long time and many, many people took advantage of it,” she said. “It was well-needed and well-deserved.”

Fisher didn’t go to Ground Zero until 2005, when she left New York and moved to western Pennsylvania.

“I just couldn’t,” she said.

While she did her best to help others through their grief at the church, Fisher took comfort in her faith, praying and staying strong in God. At a memorial packed with 400 people held the Friday after 9/11, she shared the only message that made sense at the time.

“I decided that what I was going to do was pray, and then I was going to leave a time of open prayer, so that everyone could lift up the name of someone they needed to pray for,” Fisher said.

Music filled the air that night, ending with a sea of candles that streamed out onto Second Avenue. Several police officers came over to volunteer and block off the streets, taking their own candles.

“It was a time for collective mourning, prayer and offering a place of comfort,” Fisher said.

Her parents lived two miles away from where Flight 93 went down in Somerset County, the same distance she had been from the World Trade Center in New York. She used this fact and paired it with her faith during the memorial.

“I told them that evening about my parents living in the mountains, and that the distance was almost the same, and I said it proves to me that no matter where you go, are you never really safe, or, if you entrust yourself to the arms of God, are you safe no matter where you go—whether it is this world or the next?”