Twenty-five years ago in New York City, I stood beneath the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center. What I could not have imagined that day was that the hardest part of my journey would begin after the smoke cleared.
I was serving as priest associate in charge of St. Paul’s Chapel, the Episcopal church directly across the street from the World Trade Center. When the second hijacked airplane struck the South Tower, I was standing at its base. The plane exploded into the building and erupted into an apocalyptic fireball. As debris and ash began falling, I ran for my life.
I made it back to my office three blocks south, where we began moving preschool children into the basement. Traumatized adults joined unsuspecting children in singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” The moment was surreal. Soon afterward, the South Tower came down with a violent shock wave and a sickening roar that shook the ground beneath us.
By that weekend, I was leading a ragtag group of volunteers in establishing a feeding station outside St. Paul’s Chapel. That modest effort grew into a burgeoning ministry to the Ground Zero community. Over the next eight and a half months, more than 15,000 volunteers served more than a half million meals. Chiropractors, podiatrists, massage therapists and grief counselors cared for exhausted recovery workers. Some of New York’s finest musicians came to soothe, encourage and inspire. It was an extraordinary community of compassion created in the shadow of catastrophe.
But when the work ended and the cameras left, my life began to fall apart. Like many responders, volunteers and recovery workers, I carried injuries that were not immediately visible. The World Trade Center Health Program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), clinical depression and respiratory illnesses that affected my lungs and sinuses. Given that, plus my own poor choices, I spent more than a decade in a dark place. Reclaiming my life from trauma and depression would prove as difficult as anything I had faced at Ground Zero.
I was not alone. More than two decades after the attacks, studies of World Trade Center responders continue to find elevated levels of PTSD, depression and other mental-health problems. Nearly half of some groups of nontraditional responders—including volunteers, clergy and construction workers—have reported needing mental-health support, according to a 2020 study in Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research.
I was fortunate. My faith sustained me and friends refused to give up on me. Mental-health professionals helped me understand what had happened to my mind, body and spirit. The practice that eventually became central to my recovery was forgiveness.
I trained in the methods developed by Fred Luskin and the Stanford Forgiveness Project, whose evidence-based approach helped me understand that forgiveness does not mean forgetting what happened, excusing wrongdoing or surrendering any demand for justice. Forgiveness is something we do for ourselves and is not the same thing as reconciliation. Forgiveness means reclaiming our freedom from the wounds and resentments that might otherwise shape the rest of our lives.
And here is something else I have learned: every community has its own Ground Zero. Charleston has become known around the world for extraordinary acts of grace and forgiveness after unspeakable violence. But forgiveness is not a single heroic act. It is a daily practice. It asks not only how we remember tragedy, but how we refuse to let tragedy become our identity.
On August 27, I look forward to continuing this conversation with our community at Circular Congregational Church in an evening presented in partnership with Buxton Books. My hope is not simply to tell the story of Ground Zero, but to explore what every community eventually faces: how we remember honestly, grieve deeply and still choose a future that is not defined by our wounds.
Lyndon Harris is a forgiveness teacher and coach, keynoter and workshop leader who lives in West Ashley. His memoir, “Forgiveness at Ground Zero,” (Bloomsbury Academic Press) is available July 23.. More: lyndonharris.com
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