Travel to Italy, France, or Spain and you’ll be inundated with churches, relics, and burial places. These holy sites and treasures are the results of the lives of holy men and women across Europe tradition developing over the centuries. For those of us in the New World, or in the emerging regions of Catholicism, we do not have the luxury of passing countless holy sites along our commute to work or the grocery store. But we are not without treasures of our own.

This week, our family will travel to upstate New York to visit the St. Kateri Tekakwitha shrine. We will visit the ruins of her village, the physical place where she grew up and lived. It is just one site here in the United States where saints have walked. There is the village of Blessed Fr. Stanley Rother in Okarche, Oklahoma. There’s Bishop Fulton Sheen’s Peoria, Buffalo, and New York. Holy sites dot our land as the stories of these heroic men and women become more widely known and the canonizations of North American saints continue.

We visit these places not for thrills or tourism, but as moments of philosophical pause. We walk where they walked, and see what they saw. It is some small reminder that sainthood isn’t reserved for the clergy, the perfect, or the Italian. Sainthood is a wide boulevard for us and our story. It is who we were made to be, and it should be the rule, not the exception, for us in our lives.

Every saint experiences adversity on their path to sainthood. For some, it’s plainly seen through gruesome persecution or public martyrdom. For most, it’s the quiet struggle in the mind and heart to choose to say yes to God’s plan. The point is, they made it, and we can join them.

Our trip will be one of many memories and experiences, and the ruins may look like an ordinary grassy field in midsummer bloom. But the ordinary appearance hides the true treasure. That on this soil walked a girl who had the moral courage to walk away from tribe, friends, and family and give everything she had to acquire the One who loved her first. May we each choose to follow in her footsteps.