For those touched most by 9/11, a turning point in faith

Things ‘happen on God’s time’

After Liz Holmes perished at the Trade Center, people worried about her 12-year-old son, Travis Boyd. He’d seen a jet smash into his mother’s building on TV and had gone with relatives from hospital to hospital searching for her. Afterward, he didn’t cry or mourn or show much emotion. He needed professional help, his aunt thought.

In fact, Travis says, he would wake in the middle of night in a cold sweat and cry for Holmes, who’d raised him as a single mother. That’s when his faith, nurtured over the years at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, came into play.

“I knew God would get me through it,” he says. “That’s just his way. It allowed me to keep go...

Things ‘happen on God’s time’

After Liz Holmes perished at the Trade Center, people worried about her 12-year-old son, Travis Boyd. He’d seen a jet smash into his mother’s building on TV and had gone with relatives from hospital to hospital searching for her. Afterward, he didn’t cry or mourn or show much emotion. He needed professional help, his aunt thought.

In fact, Travis says, he would wake in the middle of night in a cold sweat and cry for Holmes, who’d raised him as a single mother. That’s when his faith, nurtured over the years at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, came into play.

“I knew God would get me through it,” he says. “That’s just his way. It allowed me to keep going to school, to stay on the honor roll. I didn’t cry in front of people because I knew that my mom wouldn’t have wanted me to.”

By December, he realized his mother was not coming back. His midnight prayer changed from asking that she be found to asking God to care for him in her absence. He says he was not angry or bitter: “I knew God does things for a reason, not just when and how we want them. Things don’t happen on our time, they happen on God’s time.

“People said, ‘He needs to talk about it,’ but I was talking to God on a daily basis. It helped me to talk about things when I prayed. If you talk to God, basically he’s your therapist.”

He says he stopped going to his appointments with a psychologist, and the sessions were canceled.

Now he’s 19 and a freshman at Virginia Union University in Richmond. He’s made the dean’s list and founded a gospel choir. He quotes St. Paul: “ ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.’ I was happy to see the unseen; that’s when my faith came into play.”

Signs in everyday life

One day in 2002, Bonnie McEneaney was in a meeting with other Trade Center widows when there was a knock on the door.

It was her minister. The remains of her husband, Eamon, who worked on the 105th floor, had been found.

The m

It was her minister. The remains of her husband, Eamon, who worked on the 105th floor, had been found.

The minister said he’d drive her home. On the way, he pulled into the cemetery. “He said I had to start thinking about this,” she recalls.

Suddenly, the minister stopped the car; a great blue heron was in the road. Then she realized: Her father had loved a blue heron that used to stand outside his seaside home in Florida. Eamon had given him a large Steuben glass heron sculpture as a Christmas present.

A few weeks later, she again saw the heron at the cemetery, this time on the day she selected Eamon’s plot.

To McEneaney, the heron was a sign — a communication from Eamon — like those do...

It was her minister. The remains of her husband, Eamon, who worked on the 105th floor, had been found.

The minister said he’d drive her home. On the way, he pulled into the cemetery. “He said I had to start thinking about this,” she recalls.

Suddenly, the minister stopped the car; a great blue heron was in the road. Then she realized: Her father had loved a blue heron that used to stand outside his seaside home in Florida. Eamon had given him a large Steuben glass heron sculpture as a Christmas present.

A few weeks later, she again saw the heron at the cemetery, this time on the day she selected Eamon’s plot.

To McEneaney, the heron was a sign — a communication from Eamon — like those dozens of relatives of Trade Center victims say they’ve received from loved ones.

She doesn’t know what the signs mean, but says there have been so many, for so long — involving birds, butterflies, numbers, coins, apparitions — that she’s writing a book about them entitled Messages.

She realizes that to many people, including some religious ones, it’s all mumbo-jumbo. “I can’t explain it,” she says. “But we’ve all had to redefine the definition of normal.”

A ‘squashed’ spirituality

When Marian Fontana saw the south tower collapse, “My first impulse was to drop to my knees and pray.” Her husband, Dave, was a firefighter; he’d rushed to Lower Manhattan even though he was supposed to have had the day off to celebrate their eighth wedding anniversary.

She knelt before the television in her living room, said “The Lord’s Prayer” and tried to bargain with God for Dave’s life — offering, she would recall, “pacts, treaties, promises and vows.”

In the days that followed, with Dave missing, Marian walked around her Brooklyn neighborhood, going church to church, regardless of denomination, begging God to return Dave to her and their 5-year-old son.

When she realized her husband was dead, Marian Fontana stopped talking to God.

By the time of his funeral, she writes in her memoirs, A Wid

‘A sign’ from God

In the ruins of the Trade Center, Frank Silecchia found what seemed like a miracle. Now, he says, he needs a miracle himself.

Silecchia is the burly construction worker who spotted “The Cross at Ground Zero” — a 20-foot-high cross section of steel I-beams in the shape of a cross standing upright in the rubble.

He saw it just before dawn on Sept. 13, 2001, as he finished helping lift three bodies from the wreckage. He dropped to his knees in tears: “It was a sign that God hadn’t left us.”

Silecchia spray-painted directions to the cross through the wreckage. Rescue and recovery workers stopped by on their breaks; some inscribed names of the dead on the cross. A priest sai...

‘A sign’ from God

In the ruins of the Trade Center, Frank Silecchia found what seemed like a miracle. Now, he says, he needs a miracle himself.

Silecchia is the burly construction worker who spotted “The Cross at Ground Zero” — a 20-foot-high cross section of steel I-beams in the shape of a cross standing upright in the rubble.

He saw it just before dawn on Sept. 13, 2001, as he finished helping lift three bodies from the wreckage. He dropped to his knees in tears: “It was a sign that God hadn’t left us.”

Silecchia spray-painted directions to the cross through the wreckage. Rescue and recovery workers stopped by on their breaks; some inscribed names of the dead on the cross. A priest said Mass there each Sunday.

Today, the cross stands outside a church a few blocks from Ground Zero, awaiting completion of a Trade Center memorial. Silecchia, 53, lives in a cluttered, old RV parked on a street in Brooklyn, where, he says, “I’m dying.”

Like many who worked at the site without masks to protect them from toxic dust, he’s having trouble breathing. He says he can’t walk a block without stopping. His weight is up to 375 pounds.

He has trouble sleeping and recurrent nightmares. He hasn’t worked in three years.

“For me,” he says, “9/11 doesn’t go away.” But the cross redeems his suffering, justifies his faith.

Silecchia hopes, against all odds, that the pope will stop at the cross on his way to Ground Zero.

“I hope he’ll bless it — and me, too, I guess.”