We Gather Together

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Jere Lucey, 43, a Manhattan real estate banker whose 21st-floor conference room provided an unobstructed view of the bodies plummeting from the World Trade Center towers five blocks away, ducked into Old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street as he and two co-workers fled the war zone on Sept. 11, "just kind of collecting our thoughts." Since then, God has taken a higher profile in his mental life, reflecting a subtle change in his faith. He had attended Mass only occasionally; that hasn't changed. But he finds himself praying more, and differently. It used to take a great victory or tragedy to bring him to his knees. Now he prays three or four times a day. There is the small petitionary prayer each day as he gets on the subway "that I'll get out again," the prayer of thanks "when you look up at a really blue sky" and the less definable prayer "when you get out at Fulton Street, and you smell the Trade Center."

His view of God has not been changed by this; unlike some people, he has not let his mind dwell on how his faith in a merciful God can be reconciled with a merciless act. Instead he has reaffirmed his definition of God as the "ultimate Regulator." Says he: "I think God is like the Securities and Exchange Commission. He just creates federal regulations that people need to comply with, and if you're a bad actor, the SEC comes down and they investigate you and try to put you out of business and prosecute you." This uncluttered faith may be what made it possible for Lucey to hope again after the first few days following the tragedy. "There were these magnificent sunsets," he says. "Magnificent. You could say it was just the souls that were rising."

Alongside the revival in religious belief, there is also a fresh secular faith so powerful that pollsters are seeing numbers they have not seen in a generation. The police and the fire fighters--the face of public authority at the street-corner level--are bathed in a bright new light. "Heroism used to be seen as the exception," observes Eli Silverman, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, "and now it's seen as the norm." Officers themselves see the difference in attitudes every day. Strangers walk up and thank them for being there, for doing their job. "In a lot of people's minds, it never registered that we do more than take people to jail and hand out tickets," says Officer Mark Flowers of Eugene, Ore. "I think people have a different way of looking at the police. More people wave, more people smile at you now."