Faith and family have been Lugar’s foundation. He wrote in college that Sunday was not just the one day he was taught to tell the truth: “We told the truth seven days a week. When we played baseball in the backyard and there was a close call at first base, we were taught to accept the out without a squawk and found that the rest of the neighborhood competitors soon did likewise.
Each day included the discipline of musical practice that from the discipline might come the joys of music in the home. Each bedtime included a period of meditation in which we realized our own limitations and the need of divine guidance.
A number of years later, after Lugar gained national and international recognition as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a classmate from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis recalled Lugar’s dedication to prayer in an essay in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The accomplished novelist and journalist, Tom Wakefield, wrote that he was embarrassed when Lugar asked him to join in an evening prayer while the two were roommates attending a high school journalism convention. Wakefield wrote, “What struck me then as weirdness I interpreted in later years as integrity…”