From our earliest memories, we know that stories help us make sense of things. That's why, when it comes to Sept. 11, we like to hear the survivors talk. Their retrospection, the images of terror they lived through, the death-defying tales bring to mind our own mortality and our craving for survival.

As we relive one of the most dramatic scenes of our lifetime, however, it's appropriate to wonder whether we aren't in need of a storyteller bigger than CNN to make sense of the future.

God is regarded as mostly out of the picture, most of the time, unless of course it looks as though we're on the brink of war, and innocent people are falling from buildings that once were the icon of power and self-sufficiency.

"They say 'there are no atheists in foxholes.' Well, there really aren't," says Mary Coonan, a recovery counsellor who fled the south tower of the World Trade Center when terrorists in control of American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower a year ago this week.

Rev. Carl Keyes of Glad Tidings Tabernacle near the Empire State Building agrees. He became a chaplain at Ground Zero and the unlikely recipient of more than $2-million in aid relief from people wanting their prayers to go to work for the victims.

So great was the demand for pastoral care that Rev. Keyes moved his family out of their home in Queens and into an apartment overlooking the smoking 6.5 hectares that held the ashes of 1,700 souls whose bodies were never found.

"It was all just dust; they didn't even recover one computer from the rubble, not one leg of office furniture," said the evangelical Rev. Keyes as he overlooked the now-barren pit.

After dozens of funeral services, he said he reached his emotional limit when praying farewell for a firefighter found thrown over two bodies only 40 feet from the entrance of the World Trade Center. Today, his church runs a full-time counselling office for Sept. 11 survivors and has created a children's choir for those who lost a parent on the day of infamy. But his most challenging work may be his periodic visits to President George W. Bush, who calls on him for a briefing on the spiritual condition of New York City.

Rev. Carter Conlon, a Canadian who leads New York's famous Times Square Church, says the events of Sept. 11 are important for what they prepare us for. In fact, at least five weeks prior to Sept. 11, church leaders in his parish sensed a foreboding and cancelled all programs and held nightly prayer meetings instead. At times, as many as 1,800 people would be gathered on a week night to pray for Manhatten.

"We focused on repentance and taught the legal basis on which to approach God," said Rev. Conlon. "We clearly sensed in prayer that a disaster was imminent, and when it hit, we went to action."

The story these front-line clergy are guiding people to is found in the Bible, what Canadian educator and literary critic Northrop Frye once called "the great code." An analyst of culture, Prof. Frye argued that the Bible was the strongest force shaping Western literature, and taught that the Bible's primary language "is love, which is likely to outlast most forms of communication."

"Jesus, help me," prayed a voice from hijacked United Airlines Flight 93. The words are from a plea by passenger Todd Beamer, whose prayers have become publicized because they were recorded by an Airfone operator in Chicago as Mr. Beamer was gathering passengers to overpower the plane's hijackers. For the heroic father of two young sons, "Jesus" was his definition of love that would outlast all other stories, and he died with that reality in view.

His widow, Lisa, who has written Let's Roll, the Todd Beamer story, says "what prevented me from hysteria was knowing the truth -- in the end it was still okay. I said over and over and still do: Eternity's still okay, even if here and now isn't. The foundations of my life are still intact."

I envy a family so connected to the great story of faith that they live not only with courage for today but with a knowledge of the afterlife. They've discovered a depth that transcends all physical realities. If you really believe now is all we have, you can stay with the small stories that start and end all in one lifetime. But, for many of us, that will never be enough. We inherently crave the mystery of something bigger than our selves and that's why the questions about God keep weaving in and out of our musings.

As for those smaller stories, there's a stubborn one emerging from the aftermath at the World Trade Center that sums up this tension very well.

By some fortune, construction workers noticed crossed beams of steel in the wreckage, beams that have now become known as the "miracle debris cross." Ed Malloy, a Roman Catholic who is also president of the union whose members cleared the site, had the cross mounted on concrete and it now stands as a memorial over ground zero. According to the New York Daily News, the American Atheists organization is threatening to go to court to have the symbol removed, calling it "unconstitutional, inappropriate and insulting."

For the millions who see the cross as a connection to their eternal story, we'll say a prayer that it gets to stay.
Lorna Dueck, a former host of 100 Huntley Street, is an independent writer on faith in secular life and host of the weekly program Listen Up TV on Global and CTS.