Two days after the disaster, a construction worker found several perfectly formed crosses planted upright in a pit in the rubble of the heavily damaged 6 World Trade Center.
The large, cross-shaped metal beams just happened to fall that way when one of the towers collapsed. An FBI chaplain who has spent days at ground zero says he has not seen anything like it on the vast site.
As word of the find has spread at ground zero, exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed rescue workers have been flocking to the site to pray and meditate.
People have a very emotional reaction when they see it," says the Rev. Carl Bassett, an FBI chaplain. "They are amazed to see something like that in all the disarray. There's no symmetry to anything down there, except those crosses."
Chaplain Ray Giunta of Sacramento, Calif., has been to the crosses to pray with rescue workers
One of the firefighters pointed to them last night and told me, ‘There's my angel,'" Giunta said
The angel protecting the pit where the crosses were found is the Brooklyn-born hardhat who found them: a gentle giant named Frank Silecchia
Silecchia, 47, who now lives in Little Ferry, N.J., found the crosses on the Thursday morning immediately following the collapse of the towers. He marked the site by spray-painting on a nearby wall the words "God's House," and a directional arrow. The crosses are just shards of steel that came from the Tower 1 [the north tower], and went right through the roof of Building 6 and destroyed the entire center of it," he explained.
When I first saw it, it took my heart, and made me cry for about 20 minutes," he says. "It helped me heal the burden of my despair, and gave me closure on the whole catastrophe
A veteran firefighter who had been digging through the twisted metal for his lost firefighter son. An angry cop who lost someone in the collapse. A Vatican representative, who photographed the crosses for the pope. And ABC's Barbara Walters
He says they all left in peace.
Barbara Walters' niece lost her son in the building," he said. "Barbara told me she wanted people to see the House of God, so people who needed healing could find it."
The place of the crosses is scheduled for demolition as part of the cleanup. Silecchia prays that Mayor Giuliani won't let that happen
I was imagining something like, "You've got to squint up your eyes, tilt your head sideways and use your imagination and then you see a cross."
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