Years after her mother had passed, Dawn remained in awe at the legacy that her mother had left. Dawn could see everywhere the evidence of her mother’s impression, not just on Dawn herself but also on her mom’s other two children, Dawn’s half-siblings born after her mother had remarried. Dawn could also see her mom’s lasting impact on Dawn’s own children, her mom’s grandchildren. And Dawn still saw evidence of how her mother had blessed the little school where her mom had taught for many years and the church where her mom had married, attended, and served. People still told Dawn that they missed her mother, years after her passing. And that, more than anything, told Dawn that her mom had left the richest legacy.

Definition

Isn’t that a legacy, the impression that one’s life leaves after one is gone? A legacy is a residue still leaving a gleam or, on the equation’s other side, a tarnish years or decades after one passes. A legacy is an impact still felt across the years and even across the generations. A legacy is a resonance that continues to echo, attune, and align long after one is gone. A legacy isn’t purely sentiment, although positive emotions and affinities of the sentimental sort, or on the other side negative impacts and offenses, can carry great weight well beyond the grave. Yet a legacy is more than memories, good or bad. A legacy is leaving patterns that others unconsciously follow, for better or worse, for generations. A legacy sets loose angels to bless or demons to curse, season after season, decade after decade, down through the ages. A legacy is a course or trajectory of one’s life that others recognize and may imitate or avoid and eschew. A legacy is a powerfully good, or powerfully haunting, thing.

Difference

Who, really, shows concern for their legacy? More of us would, if we thought about it. If you don’t think that legacies make a difference, then you haven’t been studying history. Nor have you been looking very closely at your own family line. Generational blessings and curses are a real thing, whether you look at statistics or idiographic accounts. Families aren’t incidental. They’re instead society’s bedrock. And the reason for their immensely important role is that families most effectively raise and socialize the young. Overall, children raised in families have faster and better mental, physical, and social development than children raised institutionally. They also have overall better behavior and attachment. As adults, we affect the people closest to us. We pour ourselves into and over our family members and, if we’re strong, faithful, and vital enough, our neighbors and communities. Norms, values, traditions, customs, attitudes, expectations, language, behaviors, and even specific skills get passed down across generations. Legacies make differences, huge differences.

Wealth

The first thing of which many people think when hearing the word legacy is the wealth that some families pass down through the generations. And it’s true that when a Rockefeller or a Morgan amasses a vast fortune, generations of Rockefellers and Morgans can benefit. The oil baron John D. Rockefeller made his fortune well over a century ago, and although he gave much of that wealth away, his descendants, numbering more than a couple hundred, still control and benefit from the vast fortune he initially accumulated. You don’t have to be a Rockefeller in vision, drive, determination, and simply good fortune to leave a legacy. Plenty of hardworking Americans earning not much more than, and in some cases no more than, an average living manage to leave wealth to their next generation. And if the next generation lives the same way, they may leave substantially more wealth to the next generation, given their head start. And who better to control inter-generational wealth than the millions of individuals who receive it as a treasured gift, along with the love and values to use it wisely and democratically? Most of us would trust our children or other designated heirs with our wealth far more than we would trust the government.

Identity

The greater wealth, though, isn’t always in the coin but sometimes rather in the connections. While many people think of a legacy as involving material wealth, the immaterial aspects of a legacy can be far more valuable. The identity that a legacy conveys can be its greatest asset. We enter the world peculiarly alone but immediately take on the name, social status, reputation, and web of connections of our parents, grandparents, or other leading family members. Once adults, with the help of employers, mentors, and advisors, we forge more of our own reputation, standing, and network, especially if we wish or need to strike out from our family reputation, connections, and ways. And that’s the point: we make our way through the world not alone but on a web of connections woven in small or large parts by others. Our identity isn’t truly our own but belongs to those who know us, connected in a certain way with a set of values, experiences, behaviors, and expectations. And that’s what a legacy weaves and leaves. A legacy places those who receive it in a nest of nurturing relationships borne of identity with the one who leaves it. Even the Rockefellers who don’t have a direct financial interest in the family fortune benefit from the identity.

Perspective

The immaterial benefits of a legacy are thus communal, nested in a rich web of relationships forming a secure identity. Yet the immaterial benefits of a legacy are also individual, in the perspective that the legatee carries through the world as the legator’s gift. The thing that marks humanity apart from the animal kingdom is our perspective on the world, our ability to carry a manipulable consciousness of the world and ourselves within it. We are both self-conscious and conscious of our consciousness within a world whose creator is himself conscious. And yet, our consciousness and conscience are things that we also receive from those who raise and influence us. Our consciousness, referring here to our language and ability to use that language internally to shape our view of the world, we receive as a legacy. Of course, consciousness is a very broad legacy with many legators, well beyond just our parents. But those closest to us who influence us most also most influence the nature of our consciousness. You can leave  to  your children your perspective on the world, whether cranky and despairing on the one hand or profound and grateful on the other hand, as your legacy. 

Faith

We are not only both self-conscious and conscious of our consciousness within the world but also aware that the world’s creator is himself conscious and still participating in the world. We are, in other words, not just human but divine, taking divine to mean being aware of the thinking, knowing, living presence beyond the world who made the world and who continues to participate in it toward its purpose. The greatest legacy one can leave is that insight into the realm beyond the world. For the realm beyond the world not only organizes, structures, and influences the world but also gives the world its purpose. No life can for very long or very effectively persevere without a sense of its purpose. And the broader, deeper, and richer that sense of purpose is that one can grasp with the aid of one’s legator, the broader, deeper, and richer will be one’s life and one’s own legacy. The most spectacular imaginable eternity is within our reach. That realm is so extraordinarily rich and curious that we must inherit our spare knowledge of it from the way in which it has revealed itself across the ages. Leave that legacy of faith in the realm beyond to the ones about whom you care most, and you will have left them the greatest possible legacy.

Motivator

The above discussion considers a legacy’s wealth, identity, and perspective dimensions. Yet beyond the material and immaterial things that a legacy leaves to others, a legacy is also a great motivator for the one who intends and designs it, and strives to leave it. Indeed, if motivation was most of what a legacy meant, a legacy would still be well worth it. Do you want a good reason to live? Live for your legacy. Living in a way that most positively impacts the greatest number beyond and after your own earthly life is to live for the highest ideal, indeed for heaven. You may have had a limited reach in life, for whatever reason. You may realize that your impact is likely to only be on one person, perhaps your surviving spouse or maybe an adult child who survives you. No matter. Live for that one person’s greatest benefit long after you’ve left earth’s face, and you’ll have lived with the eternal heart. And anyone who has met and embraced the eternal heart knows that one can live for no greater purpose, for the eternal heart is the purpose of creation.

Criticism

Some take a dim view of legacies, whether material or immaterial. You hear much criticism these days of people born with privilege, as if having been born with a silver spoon in their mouth or having been born on third base with only a short stroll to home. And of course, some individuals have more advantages at birth than others. Yet that is precisely the point about legacy. Sure, you can work your hardest to eliminate everyone else’s birth advantages, stripping the world of advantage so that everyone starts from the same desperate place. But is that the world you really want? In that world, you’d have no reason to live for anyone but yourself because the world would strip you, too, of the legacy that you’d hope to leave for those closest to you, too. Perhaps a better world is the one we have, in which each of us has the opportunity to leave a legacy for those closest to us, those whom we trust the most with whatever we can create in the world that outlasts us. 

Outlasting

And that’s the profound beauty and utter goodness of the world in which we live. We not only get to appreciate the world’s goodness ourselves, certainly hard to see at times through pain, loss, and toil, but still present. We also get to amplify that goodness for those around us to enjoy even after we’re gone. The ability to influence the world in positive ways, resonating with the world’s spectacular goodness, beyond the end of our own earthly lives, is the most preposterous aspect of the world’s human dimension. The world presents itself to us as if we, too, were eternal beings, living already with one foot in the greater realm that constitutes and guides this earthly realm, lending the material world its meaning, purpose, pattern, and order. We can send ahead into a future here on earth, occupied by others, part of our own faith and goodness, bestowed on us from the higher realm. The best part of us can outlast us here on earth. Or the worst part. You choose.

Reflection

How would you define a legacy? What evidence do you see that legacies make a difference? What legacy did someone else leave you on which you continue to draw? Which would you rather have received, a material legacy or an immaterial one? What would be the most powerfully positive thing someone else could have left you? Is that something you could leave someone else? What aspects of your identity, reflected in your relationships and reputation, do you owe to others? How did those closest to you, now departed, shape your attitude and perspective toward the world? Can you articulate the world’s purpose and your connection with that purpose? Does your legacy motivate you, shaping your attitudes, choices, and behaviors for the better? Can you see the connection between leaving a legacy that outlasts you and your own eternal destiny?

Key Points

• A legacy is an influence or impact that outlasts you.

• Your legacy makes a difference in the lives of others for whom you care.

• A legacy can include both material wealth and immaterial benefits.

• Your legacy can include the identity and reputation you leave others.

• Your legacy can include the outlook on life you leave others.

• Your greatest legacy may be the faith you show in your purpose in life.

• Your legacy can motivate you to be more purposeful and positive.

• Your legacy outlasting you is a profound feature of your own divinity.

Read Chapter 3.