It's weeks, months since the attacks of 9-11, and we're not getting closer to normal, we're getting closer to God. Newspapers report that across the country worship has leaped 60, 70, 90 percent, as if anyone could really do a survey of souls. Probably they're all wrong, probably it's twice that and more. The Puerto Rican Pentecostal church beneath my window in Brooklyn has been turned by 9-11 into a 7-11 -- almost every night a preacher's voice drifts up to me, followed by a throbbing gospel jazz, voices wailing, love and fear rising. I hold my phone out the window so that friends in far away places can hear the music, but the sounds of these rhythmic prayers do not transmit. Just as well; I doubt they'd make sense absent the glow on the Manhattan horizon where once those ugly towers loomed.

Across the river firemen and Catholics hold masses on the ashes of the World Trade Center, and preachers with fewer connections flock to the police barricades to hand out pamphlets on God's love, God's hate, and God's plan. One warns that Satan is the "hijacker of the Planet Earth," another says that God allows us to make choices -- to pilot planes into buildings -- because if he didn't we'd become "evil robots." A Jew for Jesus distributes a picture without words: A technicolor Christ and the children of nations relaxing with a lion. But this isn't Isaiah, this is Animal Farm. The lion who no longer roars is clearly meant to be a pacified Islam.

On every third street corner there's a man or a woman or even a child offering "answers in an uncertain world." A cartoon in a magazine illustrates the inversion of faith being played out on the city's streets: a wild-eyed prophet in rags stands in Times Square with a placard that reads, "Everything will be all right."

A friend, a Christian, meets me for dinner in the East Village and tells me he's come to New York from Colorado to witness firsthand. But even he, well-versed in theology and armored with belief, is not sure what exactly he has come to see. He knocks on the doors of mosques during his days, seeking to walk across the bridge of monotheism, he stays out all night clubbing, witnessing first-hand the city of pagans and abortionists, the city that the Reverend Jerry Falwell says had it coming.

He inspects the ruins. By day, when the crowds surround him, by night, when the streets are relatively empty. "There are these giant orange tubes stuck into the street," he tells me, "and there's smoke pouring out of them. Smoke from the disaster." I don't tell him that it's only steam, and that those orange tubes are just a dirty fact of life in a big city crammed onto a small island. Yes, everything has changed, but not that; it's just the city breathing.

* * *

Another friend comes to the city, this one from Boston. This one's skeptical, like me, but he too wants to witness the city transformed. We sit in a café at noon and stare at avenues empty of traffic. We stand on the roof of my building as twilight falls and watch the soft cloud of white light of the clean-up effort rise from the skyline like a phantom moon. We shoulder past the pamphlet purveyors, stop in front of churches to read their announcements, scan the "Beliefs" page of the New York Times. One Sunday we even go to church. We start out early in the morning, unsure of where we'll find one. A woman walks by in a hat that resembles a performance art piece, and we think of following her to her congregation. But we shy away at the thought of stalking believers. Finally we duck into a neat Episcopalian parish in the West Village, mainly because it's there, its doors open and its red bricks humming with music.

The service has just begun. The procession of holy men and women, priests and deacons, is marching down the center aisle. We're in its path, so we slide into the first available pew -- just in time, as a young, pretty boy walks by swinging a round silver censer back and forth, perfuming the congregation with incense and turning the sunny church cloudy. Behind us sits a woman wearing a cowboy hat and holding a ventilator mask. We're not so prepared. The incense tickles my nose, and I can't help but cough, thinking, as I stifle it, that the smoke and the sweet scent aren't that different from the heap of smoldering ashes downtown, and the smell of burning plastic that still hangs heavy over all of lower Manhattan.

The church's windows are tinted the color of dried sunflower, its parishioners dressed in casual blacks and gray, here and there a little leather. Most of them are men. Later, I'll ask a church receptionist if any parishioners died on September 11. "No," he'll tell me. "In fact, we were kind of surprised." Later, I'll learn about the church's AIDS ministry. When I ask the receptionist how many parishioners have died of the disease over the years, he can't even guess.

But now we pray. It's the Feast of All Saints, a Christian day of the dead. We remember them all. We pray for them all, we sing for them all, but I stand mute: I don't know who the saints are. So I try to pray shotgun style -- I'll pray for everything and hope I hit something. "Everything will be all right"; no; "everything has changed." This isn't a prayer, I think, it's a mantra.

A man steps into a pulpit to read to us from Ecclesiasticus: "Let us now sing the praises of famous men," he says, his voice high and clean and careful. Famous men. Every day the New York Times fills a full page with short obituaries of the dead of September 11. For the duration the paper has thrown out its old policies about memorializing only the noteworthy. Now, anyone can get into its pages, so long as you died on 9-11. Here's an IT VP recently graduated from NYU; he loved to make fun of his friends. Here's a security guard who lived in Queens; none of his coworkers knew that he fed all the stray cats in his neighborhood. Famous men.

"The Second Lesson" of the service comes from Revelation, but we can't follow its perfectly imagined, perfectly obscure cadences. Nor can the believers; around the church eyes fall to the pages of the programs, reading along, stopping, backtracking, confused, relieved by the finale: "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes." Everything will be all right.

Maybe, but everything has changed. So says the sermon of the preacher. The main event. A small man with a head of once-black hair graying to the color and thickness of steel wool, a smattering of a beard, and stylish rectangular frames for his spectacles. A quiet, thoughtful voice. He is, I'll later learn, an exile from academe; a former professor of English at Yale. He preaches language. He preaches history.

He begins: Romulus, who defeated his brother Remus for the land that would become Rome, ordered his men to take up a plough to make a furrow in the shape of a circle. The city that was to grow within its circumference was itself a temple, a city devoted entirely to life. Inside the circle was holy ground, outside profane. Within its borders walked the living, and only outside were the dead allowed to lay in peace.

Then came the Christians. They weren't so much concerned with origins as they were with renovations, and the material of their dreams of restoration lay in the untended land outside the city. They lingered in the boneyards, baptized each other by the graves, held feasts and celebrations at the doors of tombs. But not just any tombs, says the reverend. The tombs of the martyrs. "At the tombs of the martyrs" -- here he pauses for the first time -- "At the tombs of the martyrs, power began to emerge."

A charge ripples through the church. Backs stiffen as the reverend hits on the very word every New Yorker fears. Martyrs, after all, aren't Christian heroes anymore; they're people who fly airplanes into skyscrapers. And yet, martyrs past and present have something in common: They both breach the circle. Terrorists bring death into the city in order to break its heart; the early Christians dug up the bones of the martyrs and carried them into Rome's center to make its heart holy.

"I'm haunted by that knowledge and image," says the reverend. "Here, on All Saint's Day, in a city where the center has become shunned and forbidden."

What will restore the city? For the Christians, bones. Bones beneath the dirt. They dig for the bones. They're sweating; it's November; even Rome is cold. They're turning over the earth, their hands pawing as they come closer and closer to the remains. The last layer of dust is carted away. The living bear witness. Yellow bones, bits of skin like leather, wispy strands of hair and fingernails curved like claws. Martyrs. The living lift up the dead and lay them on stretchers, then carry the corpses into the city as if bearing kings.

Good pagans recoil, hold lemons beneath their noses to hide from the stench. Soldiers run from their barracks, their swords drawn, but it's too late: the city is already infected. Romans turn to their temples for solace -- attendance increases by 70, maybe 90 percent -- but find only confusion. They reflect on the city as it once was, sacred, clean, devoted to life, and at dinner parties and in pubs they say to one another: Everything has changed. And they curse that word the Christians have claimed. They curse the name "martyr."

The reverend braces himself on the pulpit, deepens his voice, drops his professorial tones. "Names," he warns, "are dangerous." The call-and-response is silent but it's still there.

Dangerous.

You can almost see the reverend nod. Now follow it back: "Names," he repeats, "are dangerous."

Names.

"Martyr," for instance, a word he wants to deny the terrorists, lest they wield it like a weapon. Martyrs, he tells us, don't kill, they are killed. Martyrs don't storm the city, they are carried like kings across its borders. Martyrs don't desecrate the city, they sanctify it by their faith. And yet still the killers say the word, "martyrs," and mean themselves. They have carried death back to the root of the word and made it profane.

"How can we," asks the reverend, "how can we reclaim -- for ourselves, the word 'martyr?'"

Silence. We can't. We can't reclaim "martyr," not now, not while our enemies die for their faith and our people die, as the reverend says, "simply because they were there." There; here. The congregation shudders. We are here, the "martyrs" are there, in the desert. They have stolen the word and carried it out of the circle. We can't reclaim it from them because we can't find them. We're winning the war but losing our language. The reverend waits, the congregation searches, remembers the reverend's reference to the beginning of Rome. Yes. "To the root of things," he calls.

Where we find that the word martyr's meaning derives not from its violence but from the vision it requires. "Know that" -- he pauses, giving us time to know, in our bones -- "know that, the word means, 'witness.'"

Witness, that kind Christian word. "Now, even that word, 'witness,' is dangerous," says the reverend. "For we have all witnessed too much."

Names may be dangerous, but verbs are volatile. Witness, he preaches, is not merely thrust upon us, but something we bear. All Saint's Day, the feast that commemorates bringing the bodies inside the circle, making the bones holy is not about being witnesses, but about bearing witness. We carry the bones of our ancestors on our shoulders. We carry ash in the dust that coats our clothes, in the scent of death that lurks beneath the smell of the city.

Breathe deep. Bear witness.

* * *

In sacred time there are no beginnings, just opposites switching places. The city becomes a graveyard becomes the city. In the smoke of a Christian service, we lose sight of the black clouds of the Hebrew temple burning.

Bear witness, "enter the cloud of witnesses that will follow," as the reverend puts it. The very term "witness" existing only in the presence of an antecedent, a "before" that we who come after are able, only partially, to see. Christian or not, history determines that we all bear witness, that we see and transform. "Everything has changed," is always true. And the apocalypse is always now. But then, so is the creation.

After the sermon comes the baptism of a little girl named Emma, a bundle of milk and roses in a white jumper. She's attended by two mothers, thin, striking, raven-haired women dressed in matching black pants suits, and a grandmother just as slender and sharp and black-suited. Macbeth's witches around the cauldron, mothers around the baptismal font. Emma giggles, reaches out and slaps the brass bowl. It's all a joy to her, even the water dribbled on her head from a silver pitcher. Imagine it through Emma -- shiny shiny smooth warm mama man smiling sparkle gleam cold, man smiling deep sounds "Emma, receive the holy light" -- Emma reaches for the candle. She wants to get that holy light!

With Emma we renounce Satan. With the reverend we get evil behind us. With the deacon we pray. The procession marches, those who want to cross themselves as if patting themselves down -- spectacles-testicles-wallet-watch -- ok, you're clean. The choir sings, the congregation joins. The procession winds around the church as if tying a bow around the congregation. As they glide up the left aisle, smoke and incense rising to the rafters, a door to the side and behind the altar opens, to reveal, across an alley, a storm window, the back of someone's apartment. Through the smoke and the tea-stained sun, the mundane light outside looks purple, the color of Christian holiness. Inside sun beams through the twisted glass of the church's windows, casting ordinary yellow sworls onto our faces, tattooing us, setting us in amber.

The pipes of the church's organ swell -- that weird, spiraling hysteria at the high end of the scale and the raised eyebrows of the music's bass foundation. Highs and lows wrenching us apart, making us all into Emma. Nothing but absolutes. Hot and cold, bright and dark, hard metal and soft flesh -- brass and breast, a building collapsing.

This can't go on forever. We've witnessed too much and none of us are martyrs. This isn't the city of God, it's Manhattan on a Sunday, and we need to meet friends for brunch. We're hungry and this music makes us feel empty; can we put down the bones for awhile and get something to eat?

The highs and lows of the organ collide in the final phrases of the song, each end of the scale obscuring the other. A music made whole so that the service can end.

The congregation stands, stretches, and shakes off the hot sun. The reverend takes up his post by the door, patting backs and gripping hands, smiling and laughing. Emma's mothers receive well wishers, the deacons preen in their vestments. The garden looks lovely. My friend and I slip past -- we're not really Christians, just witnesses -- and start walking down Hudson Avenue, into a cool breeze that stinks of burning.