On Legacy

O quam cito transit gloria mundi! – O how quickly the world’s glory passes away!

My grandmother’s living room was aesthetically held in the 1970’s with dark-stained wood walls, with deep blue chairs, and a yellow sofa. While visiting her as a child, the aged aesthetic never stood out in comparison to what was hung on the walls. Behind the couch, there was a select group of frames and other memorabilia. Most notably, a rifle from the Civil War hung alongside a smaller hunting rifle. Around them, commissioning papers, old newspaper articles, and homestead applications populated the frames, all highlighting the sacrifices, heroics, and lives of our ancestral family. The legacy of many men and women that came before us was showcased on this wall, and lived out in the people that admired it.

I count myself lucky to be able to trace my ancestry on both sides of my family back to the founding of the country. We have muskets that won independence, rifles that kept the nation united, and other antiques that settled the West and kept homesteaders fed. We have pocket watches that came across the nation on orphan trains, jewelry that arrived in covered wagons, and old family memorabilia that is now found in local museums across the plains.

To be honest, I don’t always even remember the names of all of my great aunts, uncles, or grandparents. However, I know many of their stories - their actions in life that led to me. I’ve heard the stories of living through a Kansas winter in a covered wagon, the next in a small house that later became the chicken coop, and the eventual construction of a farm house on the otherwise near barren plain. The toil, the work, the sweat, the blood, and struggle of my parents, grandparents, and ancestors have all amounted to me.

Though I don’t know their names – I am a product of their legacy. A legacy I am proud to be a part of and continue. Ultimately, what is the purpose of legacy – what is its true meaning?

I started writing about the concept of legacy in response to a series of posts I saw disparaging the idea. General sentiments were that your great great grandchildren won’t have your last name, look like you, know your name, etc. Thus, it’s better to not help them, but rather, focus on helping people to enjoy the benefits now – live rather than leave a legacy.

We are obviously called to a degree of immediate charity - to help those now and, particularly, in our near-proximity. However, there’s a clear tradition and history of building a legacy. Why and to what end?

A quick disclaimer, I understand that everyone’s familial and life situation is different, and I’m writing this a general response to those who argue that we only have a vague responsibility (if any at all) to our children, grandchildren, and so forth. If anything feels like a personal jab, I assure you it, in reality, is not.

The Basis of Legacy

The predominant conception of legacy reduces it to wealth, assets, genetics, or a name. However, a fuller perspective of legacy is quite deeper – a transmission of values, culture, and, particularly, purpose. The concept that who you are, defined by what you stand for, will outlive you, carried forth by those you’ve shaped and nurtured.

Thus, a conversation of legacy cannot dismiss the role of family within it. Beyond the family being the basis of society, I attach my definition of family to the active aspect of family stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2207) where parents “are called to give themselves in love, and in the gift of life.” This concept of giving of oneself in love, or sacrifice, will be a key concept later. This giving of oneself translates in the most simple form to provision of food and other basic needs as well as forming, through education and fostering virtue, their children.

All parents (myself included), are going to be deficient in some form of this giving of love. Thus, there has been a recognition that the Church and wider society ought to play some role in supporting this formation (CCC 2208). Within the family, children also have responsibilities, captured under the concept of ‘honoring’ their parents. The family is a sort of microcosm of society, serving to initiate children to life in a broader society, and reflecting duties we owe towards society.

Edmund Burke noted that society is a sort of contract or partnership between those who are living, dead, and yet to be born. Thus, as part of this contract and the societal extension of honoring our parents, we must participate in G.K. Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead,” where we consider the ‘votes’ of our ancestors in decisions.

Ultimately, as a child considers what their parents would desire before making a decision in order to support their role in the family, we too ought to consider the inheritance of culture, wisdom, and tradition we have received. Just as parents sacrifice themselves in love to provision and direct their children, we are called to steward and safeguard the provision and direction our ancestors have given us. This is the heart of legacy – not merely the transmission of wealth or a name, but the faithful continuation and strengthening of a moral, cultural, and spiritual inheritance entrusted to us for the sake of those yet to be born.

Legacy, then, is not the culmination of individual achievement or personal ambition. It is our link in a chain – receiving, refining, and transmitting. Each generation holds this trust for only a time, charged with the responsibility to preserve the good, correct what can be improved, and pass it forward with intention and care. When this stewardship is neglected, when families fail to form their children in virtue, or when societies cast aside the wisdom of their ancestors, confusion and decay set in. The gifts of past generations are squandered, and the foundations that sustained both family and society begin to erode.

But when legacy is embraced rightly, it grounds us in something far larger than ourselves. It is not reserved for the wealthy or powerful. It is embraced simply by a person who humbly accepts their place in the great partnership between the living, the dead, and the yet to be born, stewarding what they’ve been given for the future.

Legacy is the stewardship of faithful continuation and strengthening of a moral, cultural, and spiritual inheritance entrusted to us.

The Meaning of Legacy

This broad definition of legacy may seem, at first glance, disconnected from the story of rifles and watches on my grandmother’s wall. But those artifacts are not about the objects themselves. They represent sacrifice; the sacrifices made by people who knew they would never see the fullness of what their work and suffering would build.

The stonemasons who chiseled the great cathedrals of Europe understood their names would be lost to history. The monks who painstakingly copied manuscripts knew they would never be known outside their monastery walls. The farmers who sowed seed year after year knew their names would be lost to history. They did this to survive, certainly, But, there was at least an implicit cultural understanding that legacy is not measured by recognition, but by fruit borne in silence. They accepted this because they understood their place in the chain of history: to receive, to build, and to pass on, even if their individual names would fade.

In the Catholic tradition, we see this truth clearly in the recognition of both named and unnamed saints. There are the giants: St. Augustine, St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas, whose legacies are recorded, venerated, and celebrated. But the Church also honors the communion of saints, including the countless unknown souls who lived faithfully and quietly. I’ve always thought of the unique glory of this type of life – devout, holy, and, particularly, silent in the halls of history. Nonetheless, their legacies live on through the greater Church.

Similarly, the nameless sacrifice and legacy of our ancestors cascades through history until we remember the names of our great-grandparents, grandparents, and so forth. The understanding and necessity of sacrifice has been corrupted. Fundamentally, sacrifice is about sanctification. A form of surrender and service to a higher purpose - first to God, then others, and ultimately to future generations. It is a form of sanctification: the surrender of comfort, ease, and even recognition in service of something higher.

Legacy requires this kind of sacrifice. Historical sacrifice – to build something worthy of continuation. Ongoing sacrifice – to steward what was given wisely, resisting the temptation to squander it for passing pleasures. Future sacrifice – humbling oneself to the efforts of the past and carrying them forward in gratitude.

Those who reject legacy often do so because it asks something hard of them: to live not only in a temporal space, but for the world they will never see. But to embrace legacy is to embrace the truth that you are part of something larger and more enduring than your own name or your own lifetime.

The Passing of the World’s Glory versus Intention of Legacy

The objects on my grandmother’s wall, the arms, the papers, the keepsakes, were never about ornamentation. They were quiet reminders of sacrifice. Each artifact testified to lives lived in service of something beyond themselves. They bore witness to the hard truth that legacy requires humility and endurance: accepting short-term pain so that children and grandchildren might live better lives. Enduring hardship for the sake of future generations has long been seen as both virtue and duty. When a society forgets this, trading sacrifice for self-indulgence, disorder and decay inevitably follow.

Those arms were not merely tools of defense or conquest; they were instruments of protection and provision. The watch wasn’t simply an heirloom; it marked hours spent in labor, in hope, and in faith that someone yet unborn would benefit from that toil. The framed documents, faded and yellowed, still carry the weight of promises kept, sacrifices made, and responsibilities embraced without complaint or fanfare.

O quam cito transit gloria mundi – how quickly the world’s glory passes away. The memory of names will fade, treasures will tarnish, and what was once admired will collect dust. But legacy is not about glory. Legacy is about intention, about the deliberate and often unseen effort to carry forward what is good, true, and beautiful.

Venerable Fulton Sheen once described the family as the place where rough stone is first chiseled; where character is carved and shaped before it hardens. If neglected, the stone becomes misshapen and difficult to refine. So too with society, formed by countless such stones and etchings. We have influence over our immediate circumstances: our families, children, friends, and communities. We are called to shape the stones entrusted to us; pouring energy on distant, hardened structures beyond our reach distracts from the work we can readily do. An overemphasis on grand, complex problems, those towering walls long set in stone, often produces more noise than progress. And even if some gains are made, if they come at the cost of neglecting what has been given into our care, or are pursued for fleeting recognition, they will pass away, and the chance to shape what is truly ours will be lost.

We are stewards of a trust we did not earn, beneficiaries of sacrifices we did not make. But that trust is not only material; it is the transmission of values, purpose, and direction. We are called not to squander this inheritance for fleeting desires or temporal recognition, but to steward, strengthen, and pass it forward. To understand that our names will fade, but the virtues we embody and instill, the truths we defend and the goodness we cultivate, will shape lives long after ours have ended.

The legacy on my grandmother’s wall was not written in gold letters or sealed in marble. It was stitched into ordinary days, into silent endurance, into struggle, humility, and sacrifice. That is the kind of legacy worth living sacrificing for – not one of recognition or accolades, but a legacy that is content to be nameless and thankless. A legacy that, though unheralded, will not pass away with the world’s fading glory, but will quietly endure in the hearts, minds, and actions of generations yet to come.