Abundant Life — September 18, 2026

25 Years Later – Always In My Memory: One Parishioner’s Reflection on 9/11

by Joe Rodriguez

On September 11, 2001, at approximately 7:30 a.m., I walked past Fritz Koenig’s famous bronze sculpture, The Sphere, standing in the plaza between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It was an ordinary morning in Lower Manhattan.

My office at the time was on the top floor of a building on John Street, with large rounded windows overlooking the World Trade Center. Later that morning, I was on the phone with a principal architect discussing interior requirements for the newly designed New York Times building. As we were ending our call, our building suddenly shook and the windows rattled.

Having previously lived in Los Angeles, my first thought was strangely familiar: the space shuttle. I had been in downtown Los Angeles when the shuttle returned to California, and remembered how the sonic boom could shake buildings. Then I stepped out of my office.

Just a few hundred yards away, I could see the enormous explosion and fire coming from the World Trade Center.

What happened during the hours that followed remains both extraordinarily vivid and strangely blurred.

Our immediate concern was accounting for our employees, colleagues, and furniture installers who were working in and around the towers. There was screaming. Confusion. People caught in the debris from the first impact. And this was before the first tower fell. Then the second plane struck.

It felt as though we were watching a motion picture unfolding in slow motion, except we were standing inside it.

There are images and sounds from that morning that have never left me. Among the most haunting was hearing colleagues counting the people who were jumping from the upper floors of the towers, people trapped above the fires with no means of escape. Even today, it is difficult to comprehend the desperation of those final moments.

Once we had accounted for our colleagues, we gathered in our conference room and began developing a plan to get everyone home. We organized people by destination: those heading uptown, to Westchester, Connecticut, and New Jersey in one group; those needing to reach Long Island, Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn in another. Ferry service had stopped, and the subway and bus systems were effectively shut down. As we were finalizing the plan, there was an enormous roar. The first tower began to collapse.

Through our expansive windows, we could see a massive plume of smoke and debris rushing directly toward us. We ran.

We raced down the stairs as the offices, hallways, and stairwells filled with a thick haze of dust and particles. By the time we reached the ground floor, we could not leave through the front of the building; the street was buried in debris.

Our immediate thought was terrifyingly simple: If it is like this now, what happens when the second tower falls?

A large group of us from several offices made our way into the basement. There we encountered old fallout-shelter signs and gas masks—remnants of another era and another kind of fear.

Until that morning, I had no idea how many of Lower Manhattan’s buildings were connected through underground passages. We moved through those basement corridors until we eventually emerged into the lobby of a modern office building that I did not recognize. What we encountered there was overwhelming.

People were in shock, covered from head to toe in gray dust. Many were crying uncontrollably. Looking outside, it was nearly impossible to identify landmarks, street signs, or even the direction of the sun. It felt apocalyptic.

We regrouped and decided we could not remain there waiting for the second tower to fall. We reaffirmed our plan, gathered whatever we could find to cover our mouths and faces, and began making our way through the dust toward the Brooklyn Bridge, moving up Water Street.

As we approached the base of the bridge, I noticed a smell that reminded me of burning hair. Then came the realization of what I might actually be smelling. That realization has never left me.

And then, as we passed beneath the great stone arch at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, something remarkable happened. Behind us were smoke, dust, destruction, and people emerging almost like shadows. Ahead of us was clear blue sky.

The arch of the bridge seemed to form a dividing line between two completely different worlds.

Eventually, I made my way to a friend’s home in Greenwich Village. We didn’t need to say anything. We simply hugged.

I went immediately to the bathroom and washed the dust from my hands and face. Shortly afterward, an overwhelming need came over me to get home. So I left again, gaze covering my face, walking through New York in a state of shock.

It wasn’t until I finally reached home that everything I had witnessed caught up with me. I broke down and cried uncontrollably.

Twenty-five years later, I hear people recount where they were and what they remember about September 11. My own relationship with that day remains complicated. Being there, so close to the towers, witnessing the devastation firsthand, trying to account for colleagues and friends— left something permanently ingrained in me that is difficult to explain to anyone who did not experience Lower Manhattan that morning. We lost friends.

And I will always remember the one person we could not account for, the spouse of a colleague whom we knew was trapped on one of the upper floors. We knew what that likely meant. But none of us could find the words to say it. Perhaps that silence is among the things I remember most.

Today, I remember those we lost, those who ran toward danger to help strangers, those who searched desperately for the people they loved, and those of us who walked out of Lower Manhattan carrying memories that would remain with us for the rest of our lives. And I remember The Sphere.

I had walked past it that morning without giving it much thought, one familiar object among thousands in the rhythm of an ordinary New York morning. By the end of that day, the world around it had disappeared. The sculpture survived, battered and scarred. In many ways, so did we.

September 11, 2001. Never forgotten.