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.

Tikkun Olam by Kintsugi; but First, the Furnace and Flux

Sunday was the first anniversary of my brother's death, and as I began to write this post, something he once said popped into my head.  Commenting on my penchant for symbolism, he said something to the effect that I'm always trying to read meaning into things where there is none.

True enough; most of the content of this blog is a neon flashing case in point.  But my response to him then, as it would be now, was that basically, it doesn't matter if the meaning is "really there" or not; what matters, and what I enjoy, is creating that meaning, working - and playing - with it.  Symbology is fun.

Working and playing with gold as my color for the year has so far - pardon the pun - been quite rich.  Around the time that I realized 2013 was going to be gold, a Facebook friend posted about the Japanese art of kintsugi, which I had never heard of before.  It means "golden joinery" and is the practice of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer resin sprinkled with powdered gold, thereby making the item more beautiful and valuable than it was originally.  

How glorious!  My metaphorically-oriented mind was off and running, and the first thing I thought of was the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, meaning repair of the world.  In Jewish spirituality, this is seen as humanity's responsibility.  

Tikkun olam by way of kintsugi; I love this concept.  But what would such a process entail?  Obviously, one needs to first have some gold.  It has to be extracted, refined, then ground to a powder and mixed with lacquer.  

As I delved more deeply into exploring the metaphorical meanings of these processes, it became clear to me that the reason gold is so valued is because it represents pure love, pure being.  If one wants to repair the world with it, one has to find it in oneself first.  And in order to do that, one has to first trust that it is actually there to be found, then actively look for it.

I realized at that point that I tend to deny the gold in myself because I recognize that it's not pure and so I discount it altogether.  But in exploring these metaphors, I began to understand that I must value the impure gold for it to be purified.  I must "extract" it by gathering it within myself from all the "veins" where I can find little bits of it. Interestingly, I discovered that just by turning my imaginative focus more to the image of gold, feelings of joy and love were increasing me.  (And by the way, I learned in my research that the human body does actually contain tiny amounts of gold.)  

The next step is purification.  Find and extract the the impure gold, then surrender it to a 2100-degree Fahrenheit furnace and add something called flux, which causes the impurities to separate and rise to the surface where they can be poured off. The funny thing about flux is that it consists of very ordinary substances, and can actually be as simple as 100% borax.  Boring old borax, available at any corner store. 

Perhaps, then, I should value the ordinary circumstances of my daily life as the flux that catalyzes my purification.  Maybe I should also welcome the intensely challenging and painful things in life when they come because they are the fiery furnace, without which, the flux has no purpose and the gold remains impure.  And perhaps, when impurities rise to the surface, I can let them be poured off instead of clinging to them because I identify with them.  Then, with the pure gold that is left, I can repair what is broken - but only after it's ground to a powder, another wonderful metaphor for appreciating life's way of taking something that seems so solid and breaking it apart so it can become useful to the world.

I feel like all of this is happening simultaneously in me, but I can give my attention to one part of the process or another, depending on my need in the moment.  I am one piece of the broken world and the whole process is the repair.  Kintsugi, tikkun olam, the furnace, and the flux are one. 

Tamamizu Ichigen , (Japanese, 1662?-1722)
Edo period