Leaving a lasting impression on young students

LET THE BUSY WORLD BE HUSHED

I raised my eyes towards the vaulted ceiling of this beautiful church filled to capacity on this late September morning as the sweet echoes of the harp, the flute and the fiddle rebounded of its wooden trusses and evoked images in the minds of all who gathered along ‘Raglan Road, of an Autumn day,’ betwixt a lady who sat with her head bowed in the front pew of this sacred place and her beloved who lay in death before the altar.

The sun’s rays shone, as they did that day of their meeting, through the high windows of the side chapel and illumined the ground on which his oak coffin stood, the shoulders of his four fine sons sheltering their mother who sat, bereft, in their midst.

Women dabbed handkerchiefs beneath their eyes as men, colleagues in education and on the sporting field, tried with all their might to hold back the tears as they thought on this good man they had known. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a male student, perhaps 17 or 18 years, sitting at the end of a pew in the side chapel, unaware that anyone was taking notice, dressed in a school uniform, donning a prefect’s badge, looking upwards towards the same expansive ceiling to distract himself, as the music drew tears from his eyes, falling each like drops of heavy rain, for the man that he too had known in these his formative years.

As I looked down on all those hundreds and hundreds of people both young and old that would walk away from this church and graveyard in Castleblayney, I thought what more of a tribute could be given to any man who had spent his adult years influencing younger men and women, boys and girls, than for this young man whom he once had taught, guided or indeed corrected to sit fornent his coffin and shed tears of sadness at his passing.

There could be no greater eulogy given than to know that you touched the heart of a young man or woman in your care, as you guided them along the path of teenage years and pointed them in the way of that which is good in the ordinary and every day of school life, your paths crossing at different junctures along the familiar corridors of a school be it in Beech Hill in Monaghan Town or in any other educational establishment akin to it.

It put me in mind of those short few lines of a poem gifted many years ago by a little girl as a reminder of the true essence of a calling:

‘One hundred years from now, it will not matter what kind of car you drove, what kind of house you lived in, how much more money you had in the bank than I nor what your clothes looked like.

What will matter in those years from now is that the world may be a little better because, you were important in the life of a child.’

This good man was important in the lives of many children, though his life and career was cut all too short, whether it was teaching the basic skills of woodworking to first years, so proud of the simple joints he had helped them achieve or as a principal of a school those years later leading and guiding through the ups and downs that were part of the living of the many lives in his care. He was constant and continuous, respectful and decent, the ballast in the storms that blew, the leaven in any gathering, full of sense and right judgement with a strength of character that shone through, throughout his time of illness, never wavering, holding firm for the sake of those he loved.

And as the Salve was recited and the flowers laid, I drove away o’er the hills of County Monaghan leaving behind Castleblayney, Ballybay and Clones, the Church and the graveyard too and I thought on this good man and how his memory and influence would be carried long into the future by the student who sat that autumn day in the side chapel with tears falling from his eyes and all the other students whose hearts I could not see for whom the memory of Mr McArdle would resonate long into their old ages and whose years in between were a little better because he was important in the life of a child.