In order to be able to perform wedding ceremonies as a
celebrant, I needed to get ordained, and so I did this through Universal Life Church, as I mentioned here.
Anyone (in the U.S., at least) can be ordained in this way simply by going to their website,
filling out a form, and paying a small fee.
I went through this process on February 13, 2013, because I
had just been asked to do my first wedding.
A week or so later, I got a certificate in the mail saying I was now an
ordained minister. It felt weird; it gave
me an odd sense of power that immediately was followed by a great sense of
responsibility. But because there had
been no ceremony involved, getting the certificate also felt quite
anticlimactic and incomplete.
Around this time, an amazing photographer and good friend,
Heather Sparrow, and I had been planning a photo shoot for me around the theme
of gold. We had talked about this being
ceremonial in several ways, but now we decided to turn it into a full-blown
ordination ceremony, which she would both photograph and officiate.
So I wrote my own ordination ceremony. I adapted vows used in more traditional
ordination of Christian ministers and added poetry that I drew from various
sources. Heather and her assistant
Jackie Kolbenschlag created a labyrinth on Heather’s land, and then on the
morning of March 27th, as the full moon set and the sun rose, we
held our ceremony in the labyrinth. I
was wearing an incredible outfit created for me over several months by the
phenomenal Brooke Barlow, who took my rather vague ideas about wearing gold and
juxtaposing the ultra-feminine with stuff like metal and leather, and executed a costume
that felt like, well…it was made for
me. It perfectly but also far exceeded what
I had imagined. Brooke and Jackie also
painted all my exposed flesh gold.
 |
| A shot taken in Heather's studio following the ceremony sparrowphoto.com |
Over the past months since this event, I have written a much
longer piece about it because it was a truly transformative experience - not
just the event itself, but many things that happened during the planning in the
months leading up to it. This piece will
be published on another website with more photos in the near future, but here
on this personal blog, which has been such a valuable and often life-changing
medium and community for me, I wanted to share a bit about it first.
This blog has not only traced a journey of creative and
spiritual awakening in my life, but also helped facilitate it, and for that I
am so very grateful. My ordination
ceremony and photo shoot in many ways was a summit on my journey, kintsugi and tikkun olam, the crossing of a major threshold in my personal life. I am
now ordained. Creating the ceremony
for this made me consider deeply what that means. What am I now ordained to be and do? I don’t want to be casual or glib about
that.
The way I see it is this: My role is now to assist people in crossing
major (and also less major) thresholds. Creating
and participating in my own ordination ceremony profoundly showed me how
powerful a ceremony really can be when approached with humility, creativity, and
openness. A ceremony done this way is
not merely a symbol of crossing a threshold but is (at least part of) the
actual crossing itself. And I am honored
and inspired to now be ordained to companion people through such ceremonies.
If you want to read more about what I offer as a celebrant, click here: Enchanted Circle Ceremonies.
If you want to read more about what I offer as a celebrant, click here: Enchanted Circle Ceremonies.
