"You are going to try to tell people about this, but they aren't going to understand... you can't expect them to because they weren't there, and that's ok." Mark Sommer, creator of We Walked Amongst Angels.

He's right, you know... It's been over a month and I'm still trying to process what happened to me on 9-11-07, and if it weren't for the other dancers who were there, I'd be doing it alone. What am I talking about? Well, it's a long story...

The short version is that my dance teacher, Alicia Sommer, is a flight attendant and she had friends among the crew of United Airlines Flight 93, the one plane on 9-11-01 that didn't hit it's target. So in honor of the heroes of that flight, she choreographed "A Prayer For Our Time" for her advanced ballet class to perform at this year's Spring recital. She invited Father Alphonse Mascherino, founder of the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel to the perfomance and afterward he invited us to preform at the chapel for the 9-11 memorial services that they hold there every year.
So, off we went, little knowing the experience was going to change our lives.

The night before we left, all nine dancers gathered at the Sommer house to watch the film Flight 93. A well done reconstruction of what is thought to have happened, the movie is harsh, realistic, and deeply moving... and none of us were prepared for that. The very thought that we were sitting in the same room with a woman who had known and been friends with several of those people was overwhelming. More than "just a movie", the film trancended entertainment and became something very personal, very close to home.

Three days later, we sat in hard folding chairs under the large tent covering the place we were to perform, listening to the rain trying to drown out the voices of a children's choir. We were all uncharacteristicly quiet, determined not to cry, to be professional... Then the children began to call out the names of the victims and heroes one by one, each child telling a little about the person whose name they spoke. That's when the tears came, when the incredible reality of the tragedy, and the glory, hit us. These people weren't superheroes, they weren't great or famous or well known. They were the young girl coming home from a friend's wedding, the older couple going to a family reunion, the business man going to a meeting, the flight attendant about to quit her career so that she could stay home with her family. Normal people, people we could have known, people who saved our world.

How can I describe what it was like to dance in their honor after that? We talk a lot about heroes now, they are all over our TV and books and magazines... extraordinary people who do great things, and they always survive for the next show or book. But these people didn't, they gave everything to save what they loved, and they had more to give up than Superman ever dreamed of. Was it worth it? Did we deserve the paradoxical grace that took their lives to spare us horror? No, of course not, but like anyone saved by grace, we now have a mission of our own, a mission to make the country they loved worth the sacrifice it took to save it... and the only way to do that is to turn our eyes to the One who granted us mercy for the moment by giving us those heroes.