Sept. 11 turning point in minister's life

ON the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as Gary Brinn walked across the Queensboro Bridge to his apartment in Sunnyside, he knew that everything about his life, everything he had done up to that point, would change.

Behind him the Twin Towers were gone. Thousands were missing. The mood of the those fleeing the city over the bridge was grim and crushingly sad. Overhead, huge plumes of dark smoke rose in a clear, blue sky.

In front of him stood the promise of a new career -- ministering to others. He was determined to get there.

"People got up that morning thinking about a future they never had," said Brinn, 48. "That day I decided I would do what I knew I was supposed to be doing -- and that was training for the ministry."

So he left his job overseeing multimedia instruction for a Manhattan firm whose clients included Fortune 500 companies, and enrolled at Hunter College to finish his bachelor's degree. From there, he went to Harvard Divinity School.

On June 1, nearly a decade after the terror attacks, Brinn became head pastor of Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ.

Looking back over his life, Brinn said he spent years unconsciously fighting what he knew since age 12 was his real life's calling: the ministry. He served in the military, traveled through Europe for a year, spent 18 months on the island of Saipan in the western Pacific Ocean working with Roman Catholic Jesuits, and labored as the night manager of a cotton gin in North Carolina.

But on Sept. 11, he decided to wait no longer and to listen to the voice inside of him.

"I had known for a long time that I was called by God to serve in Christian leadership," he said. "Like Jonah, I had spent decades running from that call, and that day, like Jonah, I finally gave up."

Brinn's transformation after Sept. 11 mirrored that of other New Yorkers who turned to religion, said Thomas DeMaria, a Long Island-based psychologist who works with family members of Sept. 11 victims.

"I think it is a pretty common response after traumatic things happen that kind of destabilize everybody's world," he said. "We turn to something that is bigger than us."

That something can be religion, love of country and patriotism, a desire to serve in one capacity or another, or family and friends, he said. For some who turn to religion, he said, that devotion is only temporary.

But for others, like Brinn, it becomes more than a temporary coping mechanism and reaches into a deeper realm that leads to fundamental life changes.

"A lot of people go through this whole self-searching process," he said. "They become better, stronger people."

By all appearances, Brinn is a down-to-earth pastor, comfortable in his new life, as if he's been doing it for years. Parishioner Claudia De Bellis says the first word she would use to describe him is "brilliant"; the last is "pompous." Another parishioner, Connie Kauffman, considers him a scholar, and said he is self-deprecating, funny and informed.

On the last Sunday in July, Brinn showed up at church in blue jeans, sneakers, an untucked white button-down shirt and a multicolored prayer stole draped around his neck. He was dressed informally, he announced, because it was Family Beach Day.

He was in the midst of a summer series of sermons on justice. He took to the pulpit to speak about pre-Civil War abolitionists and their Christian faith. The cover of the weekly service pamphlet featured a photograph of Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman. Brinn also talked about William Lloyd Garrison, a white preacher and abolitionist. One of Brinn's readings was from Garrison's newspaper, the Liberator.

Tracing the history of slavery and discrimination, Brinn said, "It was Christians that stood up against the Congo slave state, and it would be Christians just four decades later marching in Alabama for civil rights . . . And it was Christians, by and large, that fought for the abolition of slavery, both here and abroad."

Brinn leavened his sermon with humor, saying that "if you've been keeping track, I haven't made a reference to my favorite rock band, Pearl Jam, in several weeks." He said he'd been distracted by a couple of new country albums and a new hip-hop artist he'd just discovered. Still, even those remarks led to a commentary about undernourished children in the United States.

In an interview, Brinn said the spiritual journey that landed him in Sayville began in Virginia, growing up in a Southern Baptist household where "ministry was an important and respected thing." But while he knew early on he wanted to be a minister, he was also struggling with his sexual identity before accepting that he is a gay man.

By September 2001, he had settled into a promising career as director of learning at a multimedia company on West 21st Street in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. On that Tuesday morning, he said he knew quickly something was amiss downtown when the company's art director, who lived in Battery Park City, called to say he was going to be late because there was an explosion next door.

He turned on the TV, saw that the first plane had struck the World Trade Center, and then watched as the second one hit.

Brinn spent the next four hours sitting with the company's director of sales and marketing, who was trying desperately to locate his wife near the disaster zone. At 12:30, he finally reached her.

With the subways shut down, Brinn walked home. As he walked, he thought about the fragility of life, how it can be taken away so quickly.

"Why are we waiting for one day" to live out our dreams? Brinn recalled thinking. "I carried that as I walked across the Queensboro Bridge."