Taonga: Jadwiga Green on the crucifix that changed her life

Comedian Jadwiga Green with her olive wood crucifix. Photo / Dean Purcell.

Comedian Jadwiga Green finds power in a symbol.

I was very mentally unwell and my mother gifted it to me as a kind of comfort object for me to have to remind myself of that resilience, and family and faith. It's very, very smooth, very soft - something I would clutch if I was feeling stressed or if I was having a bout of anxiety or depression, and it would be something to just tether me to reality.

I didn't actually ask her where she got it. I kind of liked it being ambiguous. It came with a little bit of information - the fact that it was from an olive tree in Jerusalem - but I didn't really mind not knowing much more about it. It was so much more that Mum had chosen this and decided - realised - that this would be a meaningful gift to give me, and that she cared so much about my wellbeing.

My whānau on my mum's side is Polish and many Poles are very, very Catholic. It's always been a part of our upbringing. We were always told that the one thing they couldn't take away from Poles during World War II was their religion and their tradition.

Something we were always reminded, growing up, was that Nazi Germany tried so hard to crush everything about Poles. And Russia then "liberated" Poland and tried to destroy churches and crush faith. But they couldn't in the end. That was the one thing they couldn't destroy - they couldn't obliterate the faith of the Polish people. And that's very powerful to me when I think about whakapapa, when I think about where we've come from.

It was a really powerful gift to be given something like that. I was quite floored honestly. It's so simple. It's just a small wee piece, the length of a finger, but it housed so much power and meaning.

Now it represents more for me - my relationship to my mother and my family and my whakapapa more so than it represents my relationship to my philosophical beliefs. I always carry it in my right pocket and take it with me as a kind of good luck charm to remind myself I'll get through this.

There have always been little seeds of doubt throughout my life, but during that depression, my relationship with my faith became murkier. I would go to church fairly frequently and then eventually stopped - partly through laziness, I have to confess. Sometimes on a Sunday, if you've been out partying the night before, you don't want to wake up and go listen to a sermon. You just want to get some fast food delivered to your doorstep.

I think a big thing that made me question the absolute laws of faith is the fact that I had always known I was a woman and I've always known that I had a female soul, if you will, or female consciousness, or however you want to define it. That had always been apparent to me. But Catholics' rituals and teachings suggest that people like me are inherently sinful, and out of all the things that I've done wrong in my life, which are many, I don't think being a woman is one of them.

Multi award-winning comedian Jadwiga Green performs tonight at the Basement Studio as part of the New Zealand International Comedy Festival.