I had no inheritance from my parents. Any remaining monies were exhausted in my mother’s end of life care. And few of their tangible belongings have been passed to me. I have my mother’s violin and her dining room set, a Celtic cross that my father hung around his neck. And nothing, nothing at all, save a few Bible commentaries bearing my grandfather’s name, from grandparents on either side.

Not even stories, stories of ancestors remembered and passed along generation to generation. The only grandparents I knew were my mother’s parents and they lived three thousand miles distant on the opposite coast. Our nuclear family lived isolated, far both physically and emotionally from any extended family and my parents told few, if any, stories, of childhood, of their parents or grandparents, of characters in the family tree, noble or ignoble.

My heirloom, the one single entity of precious value my parents purposefully passed to me was their faith, the faith that had shaped and directed my mother’s consciousness from the very beginning of her life, the faith that had captivated and delighted my father of a sudden when he came upon it or it came upon him as a college student in Michigan.

It was a faith, not of rote or custom or habit, not driven by compulsion or fear of celestial consequences, not a means of attaching themselves to a desired social cohort, but a thing deeply personal, palpably passionate, curious and creative and explorative and resilient. It was not a piece of their life together, but its centerpiece, the first principle, the driving motivation, the guiding star in every decision they made, in every project they undertook.

It was this faith, this kind of faith — generous and humble, earnest and accepting — that they passed to me. But, of course, faith, genuine faith, is such a thing that cannot be passed. It cannot be possessed secondhand. I did live their faith for a while, as a child and even into young adulthood, eager to please them, eager to do right and be right.

But one day, not in a single moment, but in an accumulation of moments, existential crises and intellectual discoveries, seeing new things, feeling new things, sensing for myself the real meaning of the Jesus among us, the Jesus with me, that faith became mine, no more my parent’s faith, but mine, the centerpiece of my life.

My heirloom is not really something my parents could give me, but only something they could point to, hoping and praying, that for the sake of my their joy, for the sake of my own joy, for the sake of joy itself, I would be able to find my way there.