What we have learned

"We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing," the old hymn says and children still sing. This Thanksgiving some of us have felt a greater than usual desire to gather, and ask. Our first big national coming together since the attacks on America has taken on a heightened feel. There's a lot of tenderness out there, and a lot of gratitude, too. One way or another we'll all probably be talking about the things we've learned about ourselves, and our country, since that extraordinary day, September 11.

Trauma educates. We've been reminded that life is short, and probably more beautiful for the brevity: Maybe we wouldn't appreciate flowers so much if we thought that they, and we, would last forever. To know it's temporary is to want to see life more sharply, to breathe it in. Tragedy can leave you hungry for life.

We have learned that Americans are nimble: We crossed the divide between the old world and the new in about 48 hours. In the much-used phrase we wrapped our brains around it, and quickly. We reordered our minds, and stepped into the new reality.

We are newly aware that as a nation we are both fragile and strong. Because we are technologically highly evolved we are dependent on the maintenance of a certain infrastructure. It took only 19 men only two hours to down the power lines, cause chaos, crash markets, strike fear. We werevulnerable.

We also learned we are stronger than we knew. A nation that had spent the past few decades trying to decide what kind of cashmere slippers to buy found out it was, still, tough as old boots.

We found some things that had been lost. Our love of country, for instance. Not everyone found it because not everyone had lost it but some had. They hadn't thought in a long time about why America is worthy of their love and protectiveness. But it's been on their mind since 9/11. They are like the character Tom at the end of Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie," who said of the family he could not forget, "I was more loyal than I meant to be." Maybe a lot of people have found they were more loyal to America than they knew...

We have learned ....

We have learned, as a minister put it, that the age of the genius is over and the age of the hero begun. The observation is that of Father George Rutler, a Roman Catholic priest who ran to the Trade Center when the towers were hit. As New York's firemen, the first and still greatest warriors of World War IV, passed the priest on the way to the buildings they'd pause for a moment and ask for prayers, for a blessing, for the sacrament of confession. Soon they were lined up to talk to him in rows, "like troops before battle," he told me. He took quick confessions, and finally gave general absolution "the way you do in a war, for this was a war."

When I heard this story it stopped me dead in my tracks because it told me what I'd wondered. They knew. The firemen knew exactly what they were running into, knew the odds, and yet they stood in line, received the sacrament, hoisted the hoses on their backs and charged......

The priest, Father Rutler, who was at Ground Zero was, a few days later, on a train on the East Coast. He fell into conversation with a young man on his way back to college. He told the young man what he'd seen, what the firemen had done, how none of them turned back or turned away. And the boy listened and said, "They must have been sick." The priest was startled; he thought to himself that the boy was a victim of modern philosophy, of the deconstructionist spirit, of modernity.

"They were heroes." "They were sick." That's a division, but it's not a question, because most of us know what they were. It's something else we've learned since 9/11. And I don't think we'll be forgetting it any time soon.

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What we have learned