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 Sr.
Mary Jordon Smock, OP
Golden Jubilarian
50 years (July 9, 1954)
Sr. Mary Jordon Smock, a native of Somerset, Ohio, thought she wanted
to be a nun in the 8th grade, but by her senior year at Trinity High School,
her focus had changed to teenage activities. She recalls fondly that her
father would let her have the family car anytime she wanted it –
a real privilege in her day. After working for two years after graduation
as a clerk in the Rosary Press, which was then housed in the basement
of Trinity school, she acknowledged her original call to religious life.
She knew that she wanted to come to St. Mary’s.
“I wanted to be a Sister – I didn’t think much about
whether I wanted to be a teacher,” Sr. Mary Jordon recalls. “There
were three young Dominican Sisters – Sr. Veronica, Sr. Clare Louise,
and Sr. Mary Owen – whom I had come to know through school. They
were always so full of fun,” she remembers.
For her first 13 years, Sr. Mary Jordon taught the first grade, from
Lancaster’s St. Mary to Detroit’s St. Clare, with stops in
Columbus at St. James the Less and Christ the King. While she emphatically
reiterates how much she loved her classroom days, her health was not good
enough to continue. In 1981 she began pastoral ministry at St. James the
Less, refining her focus in 1986 to concentrate particularly on ministry
to the elderly, which she loved. “I’d go back in a minute!”
Sr. Mary Jordon declares. “I loved the people and I counted many
of them as my friends,” she remembers fondly. In particular, she
felt it was a real privilege to take the Blessed Sacrament to the homebound.
Sr. Mary Jordon has been a resident of Mohun Health Care Center since
1997. She has found what God has asked of her in these later years very
difficult to accept. But she affirms, “God has offered me a deeper
understanding of his presence, and a closer relationship throughout it
all, and for that I am very grateful.”
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