As they did in communities large and small all over the United States, people on the South Fork -- residents and visitors from every walk of life -- looked to their clergy this week.
Every day since terror found its targets in New York and Washington and was intercepted by heroism in Pennsylvania, worship services here have drawn hundreds of people, some in business dress, some in beach sandals, parents carrying infants, a few elderly in wheelchairs, and almost all with tears welling.
"A dull thud lays in your stomach," the Rev. David Jones of the Amagansett Presbyterian Church told more than 300 attending a community vigil at the Presbyterian Church in East Hampton last Thursday. "What happened was unspeakable, but we must speak: In expression, there is healing."
At noon Friday, church bells tolled at thousands of houses of worship in the national day of prayer and remembrance, which President George W. Bush declared.
A bone-chilling rain matched the reality of events that by then had begun to register on the nation's psyche. "It's a fitting day," said Jack Emptage of Amagansett, standing at the back of East Hampton's Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church and thinking about friends he believed had perished at the World Trade Center.
"Our pain is fresh and we are angry as hell, but we must begin to heal," George B. Logan, a Most Holy Trinity deacon and a former New York City firefighter, told several hundred mourners. Mr. Logan recalled another firefighter who, 40 years ago, fell five stories while fighting a blaze in Brooklyn. The man he called John broke any number of bones, but head wounds prevented him from taking pain medication. A year and a half later, he danced with his wife.
"We as a nation feel what John felt at the bottom of that air shaft," Mr. Logan said.
In Montauk on Friday, members of the Montauk Community Church, led by the Rev. John Best, and of St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church, led by the Rev. Peter Libasci, held prayer services, then met and walked together with candles to the village green, where both congregations had held services on the day of the attacks.
Also on Friday in East Hampton, about 50 members of the Calvary Baptist Church gathered for a service at noon, said the Rev. Charles E. Hopson.
In Sag Harbor, the Rev. Eugene McGee also held a service at noon Friday at the Community Bible Church, and memorial services were held on Friday and Saturday at noon at Christ Episcopal Church, which has remained open every day for quiet prayer. The Old Whalers Presbyterian Church held a prayer service Friday evening in additiion to its Sunday morning service.
The Rev. Ronald A. Richardson, the pastor of both St. Andrew's Catholic Church in Sag Harbor and Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Church in Bridgehampton, said hundreds of parishioners attended prayer vigils in both churches on Sept. 11, attended a noon service on Friday, and Sunday masses.
"Like all other peoples, whatever race, religion, or creed, our parishioners are grieved at the enormous tragedy that has come to our shores," Father Richardson said.
More than 200 parishioners attended the Presbyterian Church's noon service on Friday in Bridgehampton, said its pastor, the Rev. Thomas J. Parlette, who will lead ecumenical prayers there tomorrow at noon. Nearly 75 members of Mr. Parlette's church also attended a service on the day of the attack, as did members of the Hamptons Alliance Church in Water Mill.
Six community candlelight vigils organized by the East Hampton Town Clericus at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church drew overflow crowds through Sunday. On Friday evening, because the church was scheduled for a wedding party, several hundred crammed into its Session House basement.
The largest group of worshipers there, about 600, packed the pews, the narthex, and the church stairways on Saturday evening. After each gathering, the pastor, the Rev. John Ames, distributed candles that burned slowly on the church steps outdoors.
Among clergy participating in East Hampton's ecumenical prayers were, from East Hampton, the Rev. Darwin Price of St. Luke's Episcopal Church and the Rev. David Parker of the Methodist Church, the Rev. Michael Smith of Wainscott's Living Water Gospel Church, and the Rev. Nancy Parker of the Springs Community Church.
"Some of my friends aren't coming back," East Hampton Town Police Chief Todd Sarris said at Friday's service at the Presbyterian Church. Chief Sarris choked back tears, saying he felt like "a mother hen" when seeing off first one group, then another, of police officers and firefighters bound for Lower Manhattan.
"I'm extremely proud," he said, "mostly of being your neighbor, your confidant, and your friend."
At every East Hampton service, ministers warned against vilifying ethnic groups, particularly Arab- Americans. The Rev. Robert Stuart, the former Amagansett Presbyterian pastor, spoke of being stranded in Iowa after the attacks and coming home to Springs by bus. Somewhere in Ohio, he said, two sheriffs' cars stopped his bus and "pulled off" a couple who appeared to be Pakistani, or perhaps Indian.
After producing identification, the couple were able to re-board, but Mr. Stuart wondered about the impetus to remove them from the bus in the first place and "who had alterted the police."
An accidental visitor was among those at the first community service in East Hampton. Andy Walker of Toronto, a reporter for the Edmonton Journal, landed at La Guardia Airport on Sept. 11 as the World Trade Center attack was under way. He and five other Canadians on the Air Canada flight rented a car and headed east into what they hoped would be safety, as did many New Yorkers last weekend.
In a dispatch to his newspaper the next day, Mr. Walker wrote: "East Hampton is the summer playground for New York's rich and famous. But there is also a strong contingent of locals here who make it their home year round. . . . Being part of this gentle community for a short time, feeling their kinship, and sharing in their loss . . . has helped me hold it all together. . . . Thank you, East Hampton."
Community vigils ended in East Hampton and Sag Harbor on Monday, when Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, began at sundown. Mourning moved from communal to personal circles of family and friends, said Rabbi David Gelfand of East Hampton's Jewish Center of the Hamptons, who heads the Clericus.
