When head boy Jake Bailey wrote his speech for the end of year, he didn’t know he would be diagnosed with cancer. But he turned up anyway to deliver a moving tribute to the moral life. He said: “moral strength is about making a conscious decision to be a person who doesn’t give up when it would be easy to, to be lesser, because the journey is arduous…none of us gets out of life alive, so be gallant, be great, be generous and be grateful for the opportunities you have”.

Extreme suffering, we know, often brings out the best in people. That’s not an argument for extreme suffering, of course, but it is a tribute to the human spirit. Our innate shared ability to rise above our circumstances, to see life from a perspective of beyond, to see true meaning underlying the here and now, is often something we realise when it’s too late to do anything. What Jake has given us is something from the depths, the deepest essence of  his being, which is also universal – it applies to all of us and it is true forever, for all time.

For he reminds us that underpinning life is value, and there is no greater value than moral value. Economic value, which we sometimes pursue blindly, does not capture the nature of things although it can give us satisfaction and act as a kind of anaesthetic, blunting the horrors that lie just beneath the surface.

I felt challenged: will we embrace the moral life? Will we sign up for the struggle that this will involve? Will we pay the price for truth, for justice, for a world where peace is built, where the environment is saved, where our common humanity is built and enriched? Or will we slip back into narrow self-interest, to short-term selfish goals, and to instant gratification?

Will we dose ourselves with the anaesthetics that disguise the pain of reality, or embrace the pain, meditate on its source, and encourage one another to build a better future? (Youtube 1.11 – 13.5, 12 mins; short clip 10:10 – 11:20, 1 min 10 seconds).