The priest asked, “What’s your field?”

We have a new priest at our church. Great priests aren’t a dime a dozen, and we’d been lucky with our last one, so I’d spent the fall curious about who the replacement would be.

After I met him once or twice, someone told me he’d been a lobbyist in the Boston State House before going to seminary. Yesterday morning I asked him about it during after-Mass donuts in the parish hall.

I was a lobbyist, he said. In healthcare.

So I asked him what he thought of Obamacare. He laughed — “okay, this is my political side talking, not my theological side” — and offered his opinion that it was important to build a broad base of support on an issue so large.

“For example, it’s important because….well, what’s your field?” He asked this looking for a basis of comparison in journalism, and then asked the same of the couple I’d been talking with when he walked over.

What’s your field. With that simple question he stopped me short and made my day.

I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been asked that question by a man, let alone when I had a child hanging off one arm. The assumption is always that I don’t have a field, or at least don’t anymore, or that it would be dicey to ask and infer that working at home wasn’t work.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it was, and to hear my friend Jill answer “finance” along with her husband Ricardo, even though her day job now is raising two boys. Because that is her field. It’s what she worked in, built a reputation in, and where her expertise lies. It’s her thing.

It made my day, hearing that kind of assumption of a woman’s thing outside of momming. And it came from a Catholic priest.