XVI. To Guide Our Own Feet in the Way of Peace

From the Series: Beneath the Standard of Mary – The Heart and Voice of an Auxiliary Member

Every other part of the Tessera prayer looks outward.

Kindle the fires. Enlighten those in darkness. Inflame the lukewarm. Bring back the dead in sin. All of it directed toward the world, toward other souls, toward the great work of drawing everyone we can toward Jesus. And that work is real and it is urgent and it never really stops.

But this one turns inward. This one asks God to guide our own feet, and that matters more than we sometimes admit.

Because you cannot give what you do not have. You cannot bring peace to others if there is no peace in you. You cannot guide anyone toward the way of the Lord if your own feet are wandering, stumbling, charging ahead on your own strength without stopping to ask which direction He is actually pointing. The great outward work of the Legion, of any apostolate, of any life of genuine service, has to be rooted in something interior and something quiet. Something that gets tended every single day in the hidden places where nobody is watching.

Peace is that something.

And true peace, real, lasting, unshakeable peace, has exactly one source. It is not found in what we own or what we have accumulated or what we have accomplished. It is not found in a quiet neighborhood or a comfortable retirement or a life with all the problems solved. Those things are fine as far as they go but they do not go very far, you see the peace the world offers is always conditional. It depends on circumstances staying favorable, and we all know that circumstances never stay favorable forever.

The peace Jesus offers is much different. He said it Himself. “Peace, I leave you. My peace I give you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you.” He was drawing a clear line between two entirely different things that happen to share the same name. The world’s peace is fragile. His peace holds even when everything around it is falling apart.

I know what it feels like to walk on holy ground and feel that peace settle into you like something physical. There is a place, it’s called Goat Island, next to Niagara Falls where I used to walk every single day, lap after lap, five thousand steps full circle around the island, and ten thousand steps was my daily goal, and something happened to me there that I have never been able to fully explain in words. The sound of the running water over the falls. The open sky above. The sense of being very small and very held at the same time. That is peace. That is what it feels like when your feet are being guided rather than driving themselves.

I feel it on the Fatima Shrine grounds as well, when you are on holy ground it does something to a person spiritually. It is not imagination in any way; it is very real. When you walk where prayer has been offered for decades, where Our Lady has been honored and her Son has been adored, something in the atmosphere is different. Your feet slow down and your breathing changes. The noise of the world drops away and what is left is just you and God and the path in front of you.

That is the way of peace. And once you have found it you cannot unfind it.

Following Jesus completely is what keeps you on it. Not halfway or when it is convenient. Not only on Sundays and major feast days with the Rosary in between. The way of peace is not a destination you arrive at once and then relax. It is a path you walk every single day, one step at a time, with your eyes on Him and your hand in Our Lady’s and your feet moving forward even when you cannot see very far ahead.

I have been walking this way for forty-three years. And I can tell you without any hesitation that it is the only way I know how to live anymore. Making rosaries, praying them, and sharing them. Fully, completely serving Beneath The Standard of Mary. Walking these grounds every single day. Waking before dawn to spend time with our Lord and our Lady before the world’s noise begins and before the Sun rises. It is what my feet do naturally because they have been guided long enough in one direction that they no longer know how to go another way.

That is what peace does when you let it all the way in. It does not just calm you; it orients you. It becomes the ground you stand on so completely that you stop noticing you are standing on it, the way you stop noticing the floor beneath your feet until the moment it disappears.

Guide our own feet in the way of peace.

Let the Lord lead and Follow Him completely. And trust that every step taken in His direction is a step that will never be wasted.