Recently, I heard a rumour that Saint Matthias National School was reducing to one teacher and the enrolment would be 14 as of the autumn of 2012. As the chairperson of the Board of management, I was caught off guard; currently, Saint Matthias National School has an enrolment of 19, to be 20 before the end of the year, and there are parents who have already expressed their intentions of enrolling young students for the next academic year. In addition, the school knows now that they will have been allotted two teachers and a resources teacher for next year. So the rumours of a school that is closing or dying are untrue, reflecting the imaginations of people who have extracted meaning from small pieces of information, and like any recipe for disaster, taken these small pieces and cooked them into a dooms day prediction.
We humans, as a species, are very skilled at creating something out of nothing. By taking pieces of information, kneading them into a whole, and offering the product as the daily bread for the local community, we direct the trajectory of an entire group of people, amazing! Who would have thought that words could be so powerful, but they are.
Our words chosen carelessly can undo, divide and demolish quicker than any wrecking-ball. Our words chosen carefully, can build up, sustain, and nourish a community into the future.
As we consider the death and resurrection of Jesus, the reality that God brings life out of death, let us remember that Christ is our Good Word, that Word which brings life out of death. Let us also consider how we might construct our own words and conversations to restore life where it seems doomed, to build up those around us when they feel weighed down, and create possibilities of life where others are looking at death
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