Vision of Wholeness

I've been a practicing ceremony celebrant for over a year and a half now, and it's a more fulfilling vocation than I could have imagined.  It's really confirmed for me the value of ceremony and ritual as a tool for transformation, as well as celebration.

There's a place just outside of Taos on the Rio Grande that's become a "sacred spot" for me, where I've now done five ceremonies, beginning before I was even a celebrant when I scattered my brother's ashes there.  In a significant way, that was the beginning of my journey into celebrancy, although I didn't know it at the time.

Since then, I've performed two weddings there (both same sex), a baptism (the bride in the second wedding I ever did requested it), and a personal ceremony that was one of the most meaningful, important, transformative things I've ever done in my life.

It was a ceremony for forgiveness, healing, and closure with my ex.  He had begun a new relationship almost a year earlier, and I had a very hard time dealing with that.  Long story short - when I mentioned in my last post that I went through a period of utter misery, that's what it was about.  But I had to find a way to accept it, if for no other reason that we have a child together, and there was now a new mother-figure in her life.

That process began last fall, when I had a dream about my ex's new partner on what happened to be her birthday.  In the dream, we were talking across a table, and there was a palpable feeling of love and tenderness between us.  I woke up feeling the same way; in fact, it permanently changed the way I felt about her.  I felt compelled to reach out to her, and I sent her an email message, to which she responded with such openness and kindness that it moved me to tears.  It still took several months after that for us to connect in person, but when we did, I knew we had crossed a threshold into a much more pleasant and positive part of the journey.

Meanwhile, my ex and I decided to do the forgiveness ceremony.  I'd found a resource online for us to use called 6 Steps to Completing Relationships.  It entailed writing down resentments, apologies, things you forgive the other person for, things you're grateful to the person for, and things you appreciate about them and will miss; and then expressing all those things to each other.

It was an incredibly powerful thing to do this.  When we were done reading our lists, we burned them together and threw the ashes into the river.  We cried and hugged and knew without a doubt we had truly moved into a new way of relating with each other, a rebirth of a relationship that was not just about raising our daughter, but was based on a love and willingness to grow with each other, and that now included his new partner.  I felt expansive, clean, whole.  At peace.  Full of joy and acceptance.

Fast forward to the present.  He and his partner have been going through some really difficult stuff related to a health problem she's been having, and the other night he and I talked on the phone about it.  When I got off the phone, I was shaken up.  I felt the need to process the complex emotions I was having about all of it and to in some way focus healing intentions toward these emotions, and her, and him, and the whole situation.

I had a sudden urge to make a collage (which I haven't done since I made my 2014 collage last December).  My plan was to give it to my ex and his partner, and I would keep a photo of it for myself. I got out a bunch of magazines, put on my awesome Pandora shuffle, and sat down at my dining room table for the next few hours, staying up way past my bedtime.

During the whole process of making the collage, and especially when I stood back and gazed at the finished product, I felt that same sense of healing and wholeness and expansive warmth I had when I first connected with my ex's partner, and when my ex and I did our ceremony.  The feeling that we are all together, part of a great tribe on a momentous journey.

"Vision of Wholeness"

Ordained in Gold

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 27^th, 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.

A Purple Passage

One of the things I discovered in my research about the color purple is that a paragraph containing "ornate and flowery language" is called a "purple passage."  Metaphorically speaking, that's a good way to describe how 2012 has been for me.  Also, this year has been a major rite of passage, resulting in discovery of what a new friend of mine calls the "heart treasure," that one still point of purpose that, once discovered, turns everything else in one's life to serve it.

During the time of planning my brother's memorial, I happened to see an ad in a magazine for the Celebrant Foundation & Institute, which trains people to become professional Life-Cycle Celebrants - people who create and perform ceremonies with and for people.  I immediately knew this was for me, and I entered that funny process of coming to decide something that you've actually already decided.

At the time, I had just started working toward building my new business as a personal historian, and I questioned the wisdom of aborting that in midstream and starting another new thing.  But the rightness was so apparent to me that I took the leap of faith and signed up for the training (which I'm now in the middle of). 

The thing is, I knew I had found my true calling, and so many things that had happened in recent months all worked together to form one big twinkling, neon arrow pointing to celebrancy.  It started with writing about wedding officiants and realizing the importance of celebrations of milestones.  But the biggest thing was leading my brother's memorial.  It felt totally right to me, and many people who attended, most of whom I didn't know, gave me very positive feedback; a couple of them even leaned in and whispered, "I want you to do my funeral."  I know it may sound strange, but I am so intensely grateful to my brother for this gift.

I have always felt drawn toward ritual and ceremony.  I've even considered going to seminary; and now, in the Celebrant Institute, I've found my tribe, my place.  I'm amazed at how this vocation will draw on all my passions and talents.  I'm so used to having multiple jobs, but for the first time in my life I see the various side paths all merging into one.  And since focus on the client's personal story as a "hero's journey" is one of the hallmarks that makes a Life-Cycle Celebrant different from other kinds of officiants, the personal history business is also simply being absorbed into this profession. 

All the bells in my heart are ringing in one accord.  Hallelujah.

Consuming Christmas

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love. --Hamilton Wright Mabie

The world is made of stories, and traditions and rituals are the ways we collectively enact those stories and keep them going. Most would agree that many of our collective stories are dysfunctional, but to say they are not "true" is to miss the point. There are no true stories: stories, like anything else in the world of the senses, can only point to truth, make space for an experience of truth.

The senses are the portal, as we are flesh and blood creatures in this world.  This is what has been given.  And that's why I love Christmas, because it is a shared feast for the senses.  We vary in what version of Christmas story we hold dear, but if we hold any of it dear at all, there are certain agreed upon symbols, colors, scents, etc.  Surrendering to the profusion of those, for me, is what makes Christmas magical, even though I am well beyond childhood.

Representing a progressive Christian point of view, Richard Rohr says:

Christmas is a celebration of God become flesh, of the sacred presence which shimmers through everything in this world.  The Incarnation is not an abstract theological principle, but an intimate flesh and blood invitation to celebrate the gifts of our senses and our bodies as portals to the divine. We are called to awaken to the holy birthing happening within us, not demanding our work, but our consent for this work to happen through us.  And yes, this is much harder than it sounds.

Thus, Advent and Christmas are for me a call to keen awareness of both light and dark within myself and in the world, and of my own power to bring forth light through surrender to the light that wants to come forth.   I find myself, at this time of year, both brimming with gratitude for the grace in my life - the abundance I have done nothing to deserve, as well as more aware of where there is want.

This is what happens to Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.  His transformation occurs out of awareness of want, both within himself and others, and gratitude that he has the power to do something about it.  I recently read a commentary on Internet Movie Database which added a new dimension to my understanding of this:

The word "humbug" is misunderstood by many people, which is a pity since the word provides a key insight into Scrooge's hatred of Christmas. The word "humbug" describes deceitful efforts to fool people by pretending to a fake loftiness or false sincerity. So when Scrooge calls Christmas a humbug, he is claiming that people only pretend to charity and kindness in a scoundrel effort to delude him, each other, and themselves. In Scrooge's eyes, he is the one man honest enough to admit that no one really cares about anyone else, so for him, every wish for a Merry Christmas is one more deceitful effort to fool him and take advantage of him. This is a man who has turned to profit because he honestly believes everyone else will someday betray him or abandon him the moment he trusts them.

People today who call Christmas a humbug, although they no longer use that word, often do so because of the nasty consumerist nature of it all, with which I have no argument.  I would, however, point out, that consumption in and of itself is not a bad thing; it's what we do as creatures of flesh and blood.  A feast, by its very nature, is an excess of consumption, and serves the purpose of celebration.  Giving gifts and feasting both enact sharing of abundance in a way that stretches us; this, in my experience, is a healthy and valuable exercise occasionally.  As with anything, what makes it valuable is how consciously, conscientiously, and imaginatively we go about it.  It is in imagining and re-imagining what we already have that we create a better dream of life.

However, to me it's not so much about consuming as being consumed.  By immersing myself in the sensory overload of Christmas; by pouring out creatively, financially, and energetically, I realize surrender of ego a little bit more. I am the Yule log, each year learning a bit better to surrender to the flame and thus become one with it.