The Spiritual Battle On 9/11

The battle that began on Sept. 11, 2001, as part of an already in place war, was (and remains) a spiritual conflict.

The architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki, designed buildings for Saudi Arabia and incorporated Islamic architecture into the arches the surrounded the bottom of the Twin Towers, a fact acknowledged even by CAIR.

Yet, the World Trade Center became a symbol of Western Civilization, Americanism, and by extension, the Judeo-Christian tradition. It became a place of beauty and even grace, conquered by a tight rope walker and a toy maker who climbed up its side.  People worked and even fell in love there. It was for the good The World Trade Center became that the Islamists targeted the World Trade Center.

The first building to be completely destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001, albeit by a few seconds, was actually a church; St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was obliterated by a still collapsing South Tower of the World Trade Center. The church has since been rebuilt, and overlooks the 9/11 Memorial Site.

The very first person to die on 9/11 was most likely an American-Israeli Jew, Daniel Lewin. Lewin had served in a special IDF commando unit, knew Arabic, and likely tried to foil the hijackers plans as flight attendants spoke of a passenger stabbed in first class (where the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 were), which could only have been Lewin.

Father Mychal Judge, Chaplain of the FDNY, was the first official casualty of the Sept. 11 attacks as he died in the North Tower during the collapse of the South Tower. Though obviously Daniel Lewin, everyone else on three of the four airplanes (Flight 93 would not crash for another four minutes), and had died first, as well as people in the buildings and Pentagon, Father Judge was marked as Victim 0001, as his was the first body taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York.

Father Judge was not the only Sept. 11 priest of note. One of them was Lyndon Harris.

Reverand Lyndon Harris was the priest in charge of St. Paul’s Chapel, a small church just down the street from its parent, Trinity Church. It is also across the street from the World Trade Center. St. Paul’s Chapel is where George Washington went to pray after being inaugurated as the first President at Federal Hall on April 30, 1789, in many ways a spiritual birthplace of America.

St. Paul’s had previously survived the Great New York Fire of Sept. 1776 and, when the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, not a single window pane was broken. Federal Hall, in many ways the political birth center of our nation, saw its foundations cracked.