Ceremony is important to our lives, from the dinner table to a coronation or presidential inauguration.
There are ceremonies of everyday life without benefit of any celebrant. But celebrancy has developed as a profession in New Zealand and Australia in the last quarter-century, in the first place to help people with marriages and funerals, and, recently, civil unions. I also do naming ceremonies for babies and a variety of other ceremonies to mark important points in people’s lives.
Ceremony is important.
Ceremony is a way of adjusting what is expected of the people at its centre—what is expected of them by themselves and by those around them. It is a public declaration of how people fit into the world and how they’ll be regarded. So by helping “define” people in the eyes of their community, it builds social support for particular qualities or behaviour or ways of conducting lives. Ceremony, then, is a way in which people’s “identities” are constructed—not by themselves alone, but in interaction with the people around them. The building of identity in this way is something that continues throughout life. Even funerals help us shape our view of the person who has died, and they also contribute to the ongoing construction of the identity of the people around them.
Ceremony has its obvious customary place, with weddings and funerals, but the innovative use of ceremony can be powerful at other carefully chosen points, too—when a teenager moves into a new household or an adult wants to declare they are taking a new direction in life, and wants the people around them to recognise and support that new direction. Some ceremonies are simply to affirm someone’s contribution or recognise their value—a presentation for service or achievement, for example. Many, however, whether elaborate weddings or small but of necessity very carefully prepared ceremonies to support a life without truancy or cigarettes, are about leaving something behind and taking a step forward.
Clearly we do ceremonies every day, in simple ways, without even thinking of them as ceremonies, and we certainly don’t need a celebrant for most of them. And where a specialised facilitator is required many people look to the churches.
However, today, as churches have smaller parts in our lives, we need to find new ways to mark the important transitions, such as birth, marriage and death. The various draft services you will find on this site are not religious, although actually it would be perfectly satisfactory to reintroduce religious content into them—in fact they have mostly developed out of New Zealand practices and are shaped by the English-speaking Christian tradition, which is itself shaped by various pre-Christian traditions of ritual. Maori tradition has also had an often-unnoticed impact on the customary ritual of pakeha (ie, European-derived) New Zealand society.
It is not my job to impose anything. A professional celebrant should be able facilitate ceremonies which address all kinds of spiritual and non-spiritual needs. I’ve done ceremonies for Hindus and atheists, Christians and Buddhists, followers of Khrishnamurthy and Christian Science. And I’ve done a great many more ceremonies for people who don’t give much thought to whether any of these categories fit them.
Ceremony should incorporate individuality. The drafts you will find on this site are intended only as starting points. Don’t feel bound to them. You want something that is right for you. You will want to incorporate not only your own life stories, but your own traditions, your own language and metaphor, and your own values, beliefs and philosophies. And you’ll also want to incorporate the music and readings that seems right to you.
There are a huge number of choices, which is great. But the decisions can sometimes be stressful—after all not many people have much experience designing once-in-a life-time celebrations. It is my job to help you through it. I can make suggestions and give advice, but it’s my job to support your choices.
Sometimes reference to family ceremonies of the past and memories of childhood are paramount. People often sing the Twenty-Third Psalm (“The Lord’s My Shepherd”) at a funeral, not for its religious meanings so much as for the atmosphere and memories it evokes. Often secular poetry or prose about love or life or death works well.
The same breadth of choice applies to recorded music—from ancient to (post) modern.
Sometimes it is right to be downright idiosyncratic. Once I did a funeral for a “driven” kind of bloke whose pride as a young man had been a racehorse he owned that had once won an important race. He had frequently bored his children when they were young with an old 78 recording of the race commentary. The family decided to play that recording at the funeral. And it was right.
I am a member of the Celebrants Association of New Zealand and bound by its Code of Ethics and subject to its complaints process.
© Bill Logan 2001, 2004, 2005