On a festival weekend in Coral Gables, the courtyard of a stone church fills with smoke and the smell of garlic and char. Skewers of chicken — marinated overnight in yogurt, lemon, and garlic until the meat goes tender enough to fall apart — turn over open flame, and a line forms that does not really move, because everyone in it is talking. This is shish tawouk, the Levantine grill at its most generous, and they are selling it by the hundreds off folding tables in the shadow of a cathedral.

Every dollar goes to the building. That is the thing to understand about this gathering. The food is not the point and is entirely the point: it is how the church pays to keep standing. They cook the homeland to maintain the house.

The house is Saint George, and it is a cathedral now, but it began smaller — a parish founded in Miami in 1953 by Lebanese and Syrian families who had done what their cousins did everywhere in this atlas: crossed over a generation or two before, peddled and shopkept and prospered, and looked up one day to find they had enough children and enough money to need a real church.

These were Christians — Antiochian Orthodox, the ancient church of the Arabic-speaking Levant, the one that still prays half in Arabic — and they had carried their faith across the water the way the others carried their recipes. By the mid-1960s the first building was too small. They went looking for a bigger one. And what they found, in the heart of beautiful Coral Gables, was a synagogue.

Here is the part that stops you.

The building at 320 Palermo Avenue belonged to Temple Judea, a Jewish congregation then constructing newer facilities and ready to sell the old one. In 1966 they sold it to the Arab Christians of Saint George for $145,000 — and they did this having turned down other offers that came in higher, above $175,000, because they wanted the sanctuary to stay a sanctuary. One people who knew, in their bones, the whole long history of exile and the value of a roof, handed the keys to another people who knew the same thing. A synagogue became a cathedral by an act of deliberate generosity between two diasporas, on a quiet street in south Florida.

Sit with the symmetry. The Jews of Coral Gables and the Arabs of Coral Gables are, in the wider world and in this very decade, cast as nothing but enemies. On Palermo Avenue, in 1966, one sold the other its temple at a discount so the praying wouldn't stop. The building remembers both. It was a house of God before the Arabs arrived and it stayed one; they did not erase what it had been. They inherited it.

On February 26, 1967, the old temple was consecrated as the Cathedral of Saint George — and given, by the visiting Metropolitan, a name with no modesty in it at all: the Spiritual Oasis of the Americas.

That naming is the whole emotional fact of this chapter. Everywhere else in this atlas the diaspora's anchor is portable — the recipe, the spice tin, the dish you can make in any kitchen on earth. Here, for once, they built something that cannot be carried. A stone building. Stained glass. Icons on the walls, painted to stay. After three generations of a people whose entire genius was packing light, Coral Gables is where some of them set down the heaviest possible object and declared it home. Not a place to keep until the next crossing. A cathedral. The crossing was over.

But a building is a hungry thing. It needs a roof, a mortgage, a furnace, paint. And so the same community that spent a century learning to carry its homeland in its hands now puts those hands to work once a year in the courtyard, turning the portable thing — the food — into the thing that keeps the unportable thing alive.

This is why the festival matters more than it looks. The shish tawouk on the grill, the spinach pies and the kibbeh and the trays of baklava, the gallons of garlic toum whipped up in the church kitchen, the dabke in the parking lot, the old men singing along to songs older than the building — all of it is fundraising, in the plainest accounting sense. The recipes that crossed the ocean are now the revenue that holds up the cathedral. The homeland, cooked and sold by the plate, becomes the down payment on permanence. A people fed their faith into a building and the building fed them back a place to belong.

So stand in that courtyard one more time, with a paper plate of chicken still too hot to eat, under the walls of a synagogue that became a cathedral by an act of love between exiles.

Everywhere else in this series, the food is what survives when the place is lost. Here it is the opposite. Here the place was kept — bought, blessed, named the oasis of two continents — and the food is what pays to keep it. The recipe didn't replace the homeland this time. It bought a permanent piece of ground to stand the homeland on.

They stopped crossing. They built the table a room it could never be carried out of — and then they cooked, so the room would stand.

The table came with them — and kept a place set for home.