A documentary on the life and work of the late Sir Paul Reeves followed the televised service of his funeral at Auckland’s Holy Trinity cathedral. In it, his wife, Lady Reeves, described Sir Paul’s discovery of his Maori genealogy, “a document on lined paper describing a heritage of which he knew very little.” He couldn’t put it down. It captured his imagination and attention and awoke in him a new awareness of who he was. It was, she said, a profound discovery that changed the way he viewed himself and life.

Genealogies can have that effect. I have a faith ancestry that includes my own Baptist family, local Baptist churches and the wider Baptist community here and overseas through which a significant part of my Christian faith and life has been expressed. I am also part of a line of Baptists reaching back into 17th century England and Europe. Delve even further back, and I find that Baptists like me are part of a loosely knit set of movements comprising Anabaptists, Mennonites and a host of others.

Mention Mennonites and you immediately think Amish, horses and buggies, quaint characters at odds with the world living in communities most of us would run a mile rather than belong to. Yet we are all part of the same mixed bag. Ask me how I feel about this and I would have to say, ambivalent.

One who shares this same mixed bag heritage and expresses a similar ambivalence is Rhoda Janzen. A teacher of English and creative writing at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, she is herself a poet and writer and was, in 1994 and 1997, the Poet Laureate at the University of California.

Born and raised in the Mennonite community, it is her ambivalent relationship with this community in which she grew up that is described in her book, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. “Mennonite,” as she bluntly reminds us, “is not Amish.” Neither is a Mennonite for that matter a Baptist, but our genealogical roots are all firmly planted in the same ancestral soil.

Janzen’s father, a theologian of the movement from which the Amish broke away because of the Mennonite’s “big bad carousing lifestyle,” heads a traditional Mennonite family where most things are banned: “Drinking, dancing, smoking, sex outside of marriage, sex inside of marriage, gambling, playing cards, foul language, slumber parties, cafeteria lunches, Prada.”

Leaving this community to pursue an academic career was more than a geographical shift. It was a faith shift, a life shift. By the time she reached her early forties she had experienced a broken marriage (her husband left her for a man), and broken bones when she suffered a horrendous car crash. Broken in body and spirit and yearning for healing, she heads back to the Mennonite community where her parents and extended Mennonite family live.

Hilarious descriptions follow of her family, their odd take on life, encounters with a variety of cousins and relatives, bizarre dates, wonderful Mennonite cooking (all Mennonite women can cook), and above all the embrace of her generous earthy mother who welcomes her broken, non-religious daughter back with open arms. She realises this faith community that she left behind has provided her with everything she needs to weather her crisis.

Rhoda Janzen acknowledges her indebtedness to the community that shaped her childhood and teenage years even though she has moved beyond many of the aspects of that community and the faith it enshrines. Having escaped to the glittering life of the wider academic world, now, in her brokenness and desperation, she looks back with clear-sighted objectivity and appreciation on the community that shaped her. Couched in earthy humour and sometimes explicit language, her story will not suit everyone’s taste. But she highlights the ambivalence many of us experience as we reflect on our own faith journey.

Like Rhoda Janzen, we may no longer be able to dot the ‘I’s and cross the ‘T’s of the communities of faith to which we belong or in which we were nurtured, or even accept the belief system that undergirds them. Such ambivalence is one of the many tensions inherent in the life of faith and each one of us addresses them in different ways.

But within those faith families, Janzen delightfully recalls, there are great strengths we all need: Warmth, generosity, acceptance, loving care, and a deep sense of belonging.

In a moving tribute to those strengths she concludes her story:

“My eyes misted over a little as I considered these people, (Mennonites) percussing, and swaying and singing. Without my husband I had somehow drifted back to this point of origin, as if my turbulent marriage had been a long journey on dark waters that had propelled me away from everything known and safe. I suddenly had the feeling you get when, after a long sea swim, you touch bottom and draw a breath of relief: you made it, land ho.

“The oldsters were singing and smiling and shivering in the breeze that had picked up, heavy now with the scent of lavender. Harmony rose like prayer in the cool of the late afternoon, and the music was gentle as a hand on the small of the back, nudging me forward – the sound of my heritage, my future.”

In all our ambivalences, if we can retain or rediscover that sense of belonging, then our faith heritage has done its job.