Mary Fields has been called one of the toughest women ever to work in a convent.
Born a slave in Tennessee on this date in 1932, Mary gained her freedom after the Civil War, and moved to Mississippi where she worked on a steamboat.
She had been a childhood friend of an Ursiline Sister who was assigned to minister to Indians in Montana and became very ill. Mary went there to nurse her friend back to health. She stayed on and helped build the mission school. She also drove the stagecoach that brought people from the train station to the convent.
Despite their best efforts, the nuns never managed to convert Mary Fields. She preferred to drink, swear, fight and smoke cigars with the men who worked at the convent.
Mary Fields never married. The nuns were her family. But, when the bishop received complaints about Mary’s unconventional ways, he made her leave the convent.
The nuns helped Mary open a restaurant, but it struggled to survive since she so often gave free meals to the needy. She eventually found work as a U. S. mail coach driver. She died in 1914 and is buried in Cascade, Montana, where her grave is marked by a simple cross.
In her later years, Mary Fields would baby sit for local children, and then spend her earnings on treats for them…including a little boy who would grow up and become known as Gary Cooper.
To understand this passage, we have to distinguish between two uses of the term “world,” particularly in John’s Gospel. In some cases, it refers simply to the cosmos – all creation – and human beings in general. For example, “God so love the world that he gave his only Son.” (Jn 3:16)
In other cases, it refers to those who have consciously rejected Jesus and who work against him – and today’s passage is an example of that.
On the one hand, we are called to be involved in the world as salt, light, leaven. On the other hand, we can’t be naively optimistic about the world, accepting its values indiscriminately.
There’s no getting around it. Our faith opens us up to a perspective that goes far beyond what eyes have seen and ears have heard. The reign of God has not yet fully come. In this time between the first coming of Jesus and his coming at the end of history, we will sometimes be at odds with “the world.”
These words of Jesus at the supper table are not meant to frighten us, or even make us hostile to the world. Jesus is consoling us. If “the world” sometimes ridicules me for my faith, Jesus says, “Remember that it hated me first.”