Follow the dance steps of St. Peter’s walk

How did St. Peter walk on water?  He wasn’t walking on water – he was walking on faith.

Babies must learn to walk.  The film “The Four Times” shows the birth of a baby goat. Almost the first thing it must do is learn to stand and walk to get to its mother’s milk.  Baby humans get a much longer time. What a beautiful thing to see a baby’s long-awaited, eagerly-desired first steps that happen only once, seemingly miraculously.  By walking, the child learns to walk.  

Peter, using his childlike faith, responds to Jesus’ invitation by climbing out of the boat onto the sea (Matthew 14:22-33). Like the little child, he takes a few steps and falls. Faith is like that.  The more we walk on it— wobble, fall, doubt, and make mistakes—the more our faith becomes strong enough to support us.  Sailors get sea-legs. We get faith-legs.

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Faith is not just ideas, beliefs and understandings. It’s not ‘provable’ as are mathematical theorems or the existence of Australia. Neither is it untestable. It demands to be tested, as do legs and feet.  Peter didn’t merely sit and think of leaving the boat. He got out and walked as far as he could. And then cried out.

People with strong faith have been walking that faith.  My grandmother walked hers across the Atlantic Ocean as a teenager when that trip meant a long boat voyage and no going back, though she’d never been farther than she could walk. She walked her faith into married life, work, child-rearing, war-time and pandemic. A deeply faithful person who never missed Mass, she engaged with the Church all her life. By the time I met her, many people had taken shade under the living tree of her faith.  I still do, long after her death.

Like Peter’s, our faith doesn’t become full-grown all in an instant; by walking in faith, we gain faith. The hurdles along the way become faith-builders.  

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St. Paul shows us that faith is a way of seeing, which brings knowledge.  Faith knows, not by waiting until it can see perfectly, but by being in relationship with Christ now. Faith comes to life through love.

Was that Peter’s sense in getting out of the boat? It was a beautiful instinct that getting closer to Christ would get him closer to the new life he ardently longed for.  It also reflects the wrong-way thinking he was susceptible to—Jesus brought him back to the boat with his fellow disciples, not away from them. Ancient tradition says Peter, even with a much more mature faith, walked the wrong way again long after Easter Sunday when he fled Rome during Nero’s persecution.  Peter met the risen Christ walking towards the city he was fleeing, going back to be crucified again.  Those faith-legs of Peter’s turned him back to Rome to be with Christ and the church.

Christianity’s first name for itself was “the Way,” and it sets things in motion.  Along the way, faith needs to study, reason through, and reflect on itself; it receives and expresses God’s self-revelation.  Credo, “I believe,” can become ideology—including even Church beliefs.  Or, credo can be lived out in fides, “faith.”  Faith, said Olivier Clément, is what happens between two persons. As people of the Way, we learn dance theory so that we can actually dance. We are destined, as early hymns put it, to dance with the angels.

As for Peter, walking and dancing our faith takes us towards the Church, the Cross, and the sword that pierced Mary’s heart and will pierce our hearts in turn. We prefer to pick up the sword, like Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, and try to fight our way to eternal life by shedding others’ blood.  The cup that Christ, in that same Garden, accepted to drink did not contain other people’s blood, but his own, “shed for the life of the world.”  

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Peter becomes the ‘rock’ not by taking life, but by giving it; not by thinking about Jesus, but by walking to him, and turning with him to be on the Cross with His afflicted people.

Taking our faith for a walk puts us into an immense crowd of walkers.  Why did they set out? Were they afraid of Hell and so needed to collect more credits to convince St. Peter to let them in?  Or did they go because the Gospel is good and, like him, they wanted to live and dance it? 

(Marrocco can be reached at [email protected].)

A version of this article appeared in the September 27, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "Follow the dance steps of St. Peter’s walk".