Saint Gennaro

In Naples, on the nineteenth of September, the Duomo fills long before dawn. There are the women in the front rows, the ones who take the same seats every year and know each other by name.

There are the young people at the back, come out of curiosity or to accompany a grandmother.

And there is a glass ampoule, kept for centuries, that the city watches the way you watch someone in your own family.

Then the waiting begins.

It can last a few minutes or several hours. Nobody knows in advance, and that is perhaps the most mysterious part of it. For all that time thousands of people stand in silence doing exactly the same thing: hoping together.

The miracle happens there, in that interval. In the suspended space between doubt and trust, where an entire community decides to believe in the same instant and in the same thing.

It is an energy nobody designed and nobody controls, and yet it holds up a city. All of it. Including those who look at that miracle with suspicion.

It takes a certain discipline to stay capable of wonder. It takes deep roots, the kind that make you feel part of something that was already here before you. And it takes a light curiosity, one that looks past the dogmas and keeps searching for the meaning of things.

Some years the waiting stretches out and the anxiety makes itself felt. That is all right too. Because when the crowd leaves the Duomo, what they carry home does not sit inside the ampoule. It sits in having waited together, and believed together, once again, in the same thing and in the same instant.