Dr. Shelley Mae Fields

May 16, 1934 – May 23, 2009

An Appreciation

How to describe an individual as vibrant and alive as Shelley?  An image that comes to mind is that of the Energizer Bunny, driven by a faith-fueled battery.  This was the Shelley who, already critically ill in December 2008, drove alone from her home in Fredericksburg, VA to her Church’s Region IX Conference in Columbia, SC.  “Come Ye Who Love the Lord,” the conference was entitled.  She came – and though frail, participated with wisdom and dignity.

Of mixed ancestry (part African American, Irish, and Apache), she “overcame.”  Following high school in Lakeland, FL, she entered the New York Business School on Long Island, only to discover that her segregated early education had provided insufficient preparation.  Returning to Florida, she attended Nassau Community College while working for Minority Workers Builders.  She graduated from the U. of Nova, Ft. Lauderdale, with a Management major in 1979.  In 2003, numerous employers and graduate level courses later, she became Dr. Shelley Mae Fields, without ever having become bitter.

A caring Lutheran pastor in Wyandanch, NY, had led her to the life-long belief that the grace of God and the Missional Hospitality of the Church were for everyone.  In 2004, as members of the Virginia Synod’s African American Outreach Team, she and I traveled to Chicago to attend the ELCA’s Anti-Racism Facilitator Training together.  Our fellow attendees were amazed that someone who had lived under Jim Crow – and indeed, never caught sight of a White person until she was 20 – could have such a positive outlook.  Seated beside her on the plane on the return flight, I noticed tears streaming down her cheeks:  The recognition during the workshop of her unjust early beginnings had at last made everything right.  She had once survived a tragic automobile accident, she said, and believed at the time that God had a purpose for her life.  As a result of the workshop and her work on our team, she thought she was beginning to find it.

Shelley’s great love for her family goes without saying:  She would not have dreamed of retiring until after her grandson Donnie, hers to raise from the age of two months, finished school.  As for Goldie, Jasmine and Justice, Calvin, Deirdre, Ted, Glenda, Michael, Gregory, Lucille, Roosevelt, the departed James – and all the rest, whose photographs covered nearly every inch of her living room – she loved each and every one of you immensely.  But it’s also fair to say that she extended that love outward to the entire human family.

The cheery red door of her home, framed by an abundance of climbing red roses, drew people in.  Most of striking of all, to the final days of her life, she was ready to receive guests:  Her table, with its china and wine-colored napkins so familiar to our team, was perfectly set.  Shelley Fields, worker in God’s Kingdom, we know that for you a marvelous heavenly table is set.