Where There is Darkness...

We need to be more like Kelsie.

Kelsie is a comfort dog I had the great fortune of meeting today during a 9/11 memorial service at St. Paul’s Chapel at Broadway and Fulton Street.

Her handler, a very nice woman from the Tri-State Canine Response Team, told me that she and her canine colleagues respond to all kinds of emergencies, including the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando.

And they were at Ground Zero today, where they most definitely needed, even after all this time.

It’s been 17 years since I stood outside the Brook Brothers store across the street from the World Trade Center and watched smoke pouring out of the North Tower; 17 years since the second plane slammed into the South Tower moments later and we all ran, while the towers and the world as we knew it came crashing to the ground.

I think about the people I met on that day, like the elderly lady I helped to her feet after she collapsed in shock when the attack began.

I think about the Japanese businessman who spoke virtually no English and who was so stunned by what he had seen that I had to lead him around by the hand like a child.

I’m thinking about three young men who came into the basement of a nursing home on Water Street where I and many others had gone to escape the massive clouds of debris from the fallen towers that rolled through the streets—clouds that are still killing people to this very day.

One of the young men had been blinded by the dust and he had a hand on his friends’ shoulder, while holding his shirt over his damaged eyes. Where are those three companions today?

It is in Giving that We Receive

My father marked his 80th birthday on that terrible day. He left this world in 2007 but I’m thinking more and more about him lately and I’m happy to say that the good memories are outnumbering the bad ones.

I haven’t been in Manhattan on 9/11 for a few years now and while I can’t say it felt good to back, it did feel right and proper that I returned to this location instead of watching the memorial ceremony on television.

I got in the city early to take my boxing class and I took a few minutes to walk around the neighborhood while it was still dark and relatively free of people.

I found myself getting angrier and angrier as I thought about how we had learned nothing from the September 11 attacks.

I don’t like saying that, but when you look at how we have become so divided, so hateful toward one another since that day, it’s pretty hard to find any beams of light in all the darkness.

After class, I went back to the Brooks Brothers store to pray and give thanks and then I headed over to St. Paul’s for the ceremony.

We recited the Prayer of Saint Francis, where we asked the Lord to make us instruments of His peace, and then the reverend rang the Bell of Hope, a gift from London, at 8:46AM to mark the moment the first plane struck.

I consider the Prayer of St. Francis an oath, a sacred promise to God that we will put aside hatred and respond with love. And meeting Kelsie reinforced that belief.

I started getting teary-eyed while patting Kelsie’s head as she radiated a kind of goodness that puts humanity to shame.

We have to be more like Kelsie and the other comfort dogs, who give us so much and ask for so little in return. Maybe if we behaved more like them, we’d be less inclined to start wars, imprison children, and crash airplanes into office buildings.

Maybe these dogs should be teaching us old humans some new tricks.