When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. ‘’
I Corinthians 13: 11-12
These two penultimate verses of the famous chapter 13 of St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, so often read at Weddings, bring out the three eternal virtues of faith, hope and love. And the more I think about hope, the more I realise that it is a journey — more than that, it's the compass that we need for all journeys, including the journey of life itself. St. Paul talks directly of that journey in his perception of childhood and moving towards adulthood.
The journey of life follows the stages we all know so well: conception, birth, the early years, childhood, adolescence, then adulthood, seniority and old age — and then the soul breaks free from its earthly constraints, and that’s when, as Paul says, we shall ‘know fully, even as we are fully known’. It's a journey steered by hope, not just for ourselves, but all for those who help our journey on its way: family, friends, contacts — and even those who might not be the most constructive and positive.
So Paul talks of faith, hope and love, And there's no doubt that for those with a faith conviction it helps to shape all the steps along the journey of hope; and that love — the unconditional love which cares as much for others, no matter how different they are to us, as for ourselves — helps to give direction to the whole journey. So many people of faith understand that love is indeed the destination for our soul, and that's why Paul says that it’s the greatest of all three of these eternal virtues.
The journey of hope has been brought home to me all the more over the past few days as a result of the conference which we've been organising at the Institute for Fiscal Studies into inter-generational rebalancing. We've had an amazing array of academics and policy people, including researchers who have studied family formation and childhood development for years.
The speakers included Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman, David Willetts, author of ‘The Pinch’ and a key government minister in the early years of the Coalition and Conservative governments, and Paul Johnson, former director of the IFS and now Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford.
Our aim is to find ways to empower disadvantaged young people to make the most of their potential in life, particularly by looking at the human life cycle and thinking about how to make it more effective for this purpose, both in the United Kingdom and throughout the world.
Research presentations included understanding delinquency and parent-adolescent interactions, intergenerational mobility in complex family structures, the impact of house prices on social mobility, rebalancing in the digital economy, and inheritance levies and their application. Both David Willetts and Paul Johnson put forward policy alternatives, and Heloise Greeff and I set out our work on ‘Stock for Data & Creativity’ and incentivised learning embedded into starter capital accounts respectively.
The presentations are now being prepared for online streaming, and they should be available through the Share Alliance website over the next fortnight.
Building an effective inter-generational process comprises a journey of hope which has at least five stages: generating the concepts; carrying out the research; building the outcomes of that research into an education process; encouraging advocacy; and then implementing the changes, both nationally and globally. We must keep in mind all the while that global implementation will be far more difficult than national because of the lack of a reliable system of global governance. Every one of these stages is full of both opportunities and stumbling blocks. So we need to maintain hope throughout in order to keep up the momentum, otherwise it will just get stuck at one stage: that's how ideas can wither on the vine.
And so it is with all journeys. Whether they involve travel, families, business, economics or politics, you need a sense of purpose and direction: but, in order to keep the momentum moving, you also need hope. That also calls for a certain sense of optimism — as that wonderful quote from the movie ‘Interstellar’ reminds us, drawing the contrast between ‘looking up at the sky and wondering at our place in the stars’ and ‘looking down and worrying about our place in the dirt’.
Looking up is a key part of the journey of hope; so, to finish this commentary, here’s a short piece on the importance of looking up, from Melanie Harrington-Haynes:
‘I had a very wonderful Classics teacher who once whisked us out of the classroom to the streets surrounding the school, giving us strict instructions to look up while we walked the city around us. We craned our necks, bumped into each other, and looked up at architecture never seen by our eyes before. ‘Look up, girls,’ I remember her projecting loudly over the noise of the traffic, ‘there are wonderful and important things in life you will completely miss out on if you don't look up’. I was astonished by what I hadn't been seeing. It was a lesson that stuck with me — the treasures of the always present, but often overlooked, dimension above our heads’.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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