The morning of the attacks, parents of a young man who worked in one of the Twin Towers wandered into Newman Centre looking for a TV, desperate for news, said O’Dea.
“They asked if there was a TV around, then of course they saw the big one,” he said. “I said, ‘Are you OK?’ They said their son was in the building and they were visiting Toronto. While they were there they got a call saying he was OK.”
O’Dea and the parents who had just learned their son was alive went from the student lounge to the church next door to celebrate the regular noon Mass.
“Of course the Mass was more crowded than usual. I remember that couple sitting at the back with this look on their faces that they had been handed back their lives. That couple kind of said a lot to me about being grateful and being horrified... They were just on their knees, literally on their knees, most of the Mass.”
O’Dea and his staff decided they needed to offer people a formal chance to pray as soon as possible. They found a supply of candles and set 3 p.m. for a prayer service.
About 60 people showed up at the service on the basis of a couple of photocopied signs and word of mouth. This reporter was there with a camera. Shooting by candlelight, I managed just one worthwhile picture of students Allana Harkin and Michael Lagimodire.
A few years later O’Dea presided at the couple’s wedding. Hakin and Lagimodire live in Toronto today with their two children, pursuing careers in theatre.
O’Dea still feels the world changed that day, but he doesn’t believe we’ve given in to fear.
“I think people just grew up. I think it took away a bit of innocence,” he said.
But a loss of innocence doesn’t necessarily translate into either paranoia or cynicism. “Out of 9/11 too came those great acts of charity and mercy, and acts of hospitality in the Canadian experience,” said O’Dea. “I don’t think it’s prevented people from being hopeful.”
On vacation in New York City in 2008, I found it impossible as a photographer not to document how New Yorkers have continued to hope. The official monument near the site of Ground Zero is fearsome, but also defiant. An unofficial monument made up of hand-made tiles attached to a chain link fence in Greenwich Village showed a determination to answer the attacks with their opposite. The tiles spoke not of revenge, but of love.
One tile quoted St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians 1:9-11.
“And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is the best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ — to the glory and praise of God.”