Ceremonies and Celebrations #1

I loved formal ritual-making when I was introduced to it in the mid-1980s.  Groups I’ve been part of have usually shared the creation and facilitation of rituals to mark the different seasons of the year and milestones in people’s lives.  Sometimes I created rituals on my own, and sometimes with others.  The most powerful have often been those that marked personal transitions, such as leaving Auckland, and the death of my mother.  For more personal occasions I have sometimes asked someone else to lead what I’ve planned.  To plan rituals I usually followed the format outlined in Juliet Batten’s book Power From Within.

Soon after coming to Christchurch I joined PLEBS (Plains Exchange and Barter System), a Green dollar exchange where I offered my services as a ritual-maker.  The first person to avail herself of this was a woman who wanted a croning ceremony.

In 1994 I applied to be a marriage celebrant and was turned down.  At that time the criteria for registration were strictly based on geographical area, and there were already plenty of registered celebrants in Christchurch.  In 1997 our local M.P. Tim Barnett asked to nominate me as a Justice of the Peace.  After careful consideration I accepted, partly in the hope that this might help an application for celebrant registration.

In 2003 Mary Hancock offered formal celebrant training in Christchurch for the first time.  I took advantage of this, which built on the practical knowledge and experience I’d gained over the previous twenty years, and I received a Certificate in Celebrant Studies from the Auckland University of Technology.  I again applied to be registered as a marriage celebrant but was told there were already too many independent celebrants in Christchurch, and 88 people on a waiting list.

I then discovered that it was possible to become registered as an organizational celebrant, usually linked with a church.  I enlisted the help of a group of friends, mainly from my ritual group, who shared my spiritual beliefs and were prepared to support me.  We created a set of Guiding Principles, which ten people were prepared to formally subscribe to, and our group which we called Spiritual Spiral was approved by the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) as an Organisation for the purposes of the Marriage Act.  The group then nominated me as a celebrant and in early 2005 I became registered to perform marriages and civil unions.

I stayed quite firmly undeterred
in my quest to be registered.