My Day as a Mennonite

Yesterday, I had a very Mennonite day (for me). I slept in til 9, walked the dog, made granola from More With Less, worked on a quilt, did the laundry, ate leftovers for lunch, and fixed hash from MCC:FFR. Then I drove a half-hour to my work place of Starbucks where I talked with another barista, who is also a bartender, about all the T'n'A he's going to see tonight at the bar for MardiGras.

Despite all my contradictions, I am still Mennonite. I am not sure what exactly this means. I have come to realize that I have something that my ancestors do not: a sense of self-awareness that being Mennonite means something, and I often curse this introspection. The fact that I can take a tally of my day and say, well here I was a good Mennonite, and there I was not, is not something my ancestors had the privilege of. They only knew one way of life, and it was all-consuming. To be part of the community was everything, and to be outside of the community was death. Certainly a permanent divorce. Now we have grown to be analytical about our ethnic identity: to the point that we are blogging about our ethnic food! Obviously, I enjoy participating in this thought process, or I wouldn't be writing about it. But I sometimes wonder if all the self-awareness robs us of some of the experience. Isn't the point or our ethnic identity that we own it without questioning it?

For me this is not, nor has it ever been, an option. But when I look at people I consider to be true-blue Mennonite, their lives are very linear - straight and narrow, one could say. And I admire them at the same time that I look at my own zig-zag path and say, "What happened?"