Letters to My Children: A Father Passes on His Values

Each of us creates with our lives a spiritual legacy-a legacy of values, insights, passions, and meaningful actions that can be passed on to those we care about most. The single best carrier of spiritual legacies is stories-the stories that arise from everyone's life experiences and preserve their uniqueness and significance.

These letters from a father to his children tell such stories-stories of success and failure, of faith and questioning, of neglected virtues and laughter and love. Many of them are rooted in childhood and adolescence, others in youth and early marriage. They speak honestly and engagingly both to the young and to those who are trying, the best they can, to raise them.

Read these stories with your children or by yourself and you will smile in recognition as you remember your own struggles to understand the world and your place in it. Then, as the afterward suggests, tell a few stories of your own.