No Fear

What a celebrant does

You are a child of the Universe,
No less than the trees and the stars,
You have a right to be here.
       (Desiderata, Max Ehrmann)

When the Ancients lay on the cool ground at night, looking up at the stars, which encrusted the heavens like an unfolding glittering white cloth, they liked to imagine patterns like the join-the-dots pictures you may have drawn when you were a child. Some of these they named after animals – the Great Bear, the Swan, the Scorpion; some were characters from story – Hercules, Cassiopeia, Cepheus.

In reality these are not groups of stars at all. They just look that way from Earth. But we could equally group them in different ways if we wanted. We could have the Fork-lift Truck, the Harley Davidson, Tower Bridge. Seeing patterns in things comes easily to us. This is how we make sense of the world, of history, of our own lives.

As with the stars, we don't have just one story to tell. When we write a job application we will include everything about our education, our relevant experience and our positions of responsibility. But we probably won't include the way we struggled with bullying at school, or the dedication and love of our parents. We won't include the one we love, and the day we first met. Yet these things also have their story, and they are more a part of us than our position at work.

While our mundane life plods on from education to qualification to position to promotion to retirement to death, inside we are super-heros on a great adventure. We face danger, injury and disease; we see friends and family through life and death; we witness the miracle of birth; we struggle with our weakness as much as with our greatness. Against all the odds we triumph.

This is our brilliant human existence. It is a story written in the stars, waiting to be told. Who will tell our story? Or will it be buried with our bones? The skill of a celebrant is to recognise you as a child of the Universe, no less than the trees and the stars, your life unfolding like a cloth of silver.

With each turn of life there is a death and a rebirth. When we are born, the waiting is over, the period of pregnancy ends. It is a joyful beginning, but there is also a sense of loss; ask any mother. We cross a threshold into the unknown. And so at each new stage of life: starting school, starting secondary school, leaving home, starting work, giving vows, - right through to retirement, each milestone a new beginning.

A celebration can be seen as a snapshot pasted up onto the storyboard of our life, recording each stage as we go through. But there is more to it than just this. Imagine for a moment that you finally worked out for yourself how space and time was really structured, an understanding that would end a hundred years of speculation. Naturally you would want to tell the world. Why? Because until you do, to all intents and purposes, it hasn't happened. Unless you share it, it is just something in your head. Likewise a ceremony actualises reality – it makes reality happen.

In the Jewish tradition, a statement can occur on three levels: the first is a thought – even a thought is an action; the next is the spoken word, which is more powerful than just a thought; the most potent of all is the deed. In business, a handshake, or in previous times a kiss, seals a deal. Wearing the ring seals the marriage. A ceremony binds an idea into fact.

A qualified celebrant can work with you to make a ceremony that is right for you where you are in your life, that says what you want to say, that has the right feel. It can combine words, music, light, colour, costume - plus doves, balloons, fireworks, anything! Or just a few well-chosen words in a solemn setting. It's your call. You matter.

Boyhood

Last week I went to see Richard Linklater's epic film Boyhood. If you like action adventures, don't go. I loved it to bits.

Nathaniel, writing in TheFilmExperience.net says this:

Boyhood is less about its narrative than the experience of making one's own story through living, romanticizing, examining and sometimes confronting life itself.

Making ones own story. We can find ourselves wasting our lives trying to get a walk-on part in someone else's story when in reality we are starring in our own show right now, just like Truman in The Truman Show. We are real, but only when we are not playing a part.

We should be celebrating at every twist and turn because this is our life. We are not waiting for it to start, we cannot disown the bits we don't like, they are all what we are.

There is a beautiful scene in Boyhood, where the boy Mason's Mum casually advises an immigrant labourer to go to evening classes and learn English because he deserves better in life. Years later she is served by him in the restaurant he now manages, having gone to class and made good. She is struck speechless. She realises that in her preoccupation with her career and her relationships, much of her life has gone by unnoticed.

"You know what I'm realising? My life is just going to go. Like that. This series of milestones. Getting married. Having kids. Getting divorced. The time that we thought you were dyslexic. When I taught you how to ride a bike. Getting divorced... again. Getting my masters degree. Finally getting the job I wanted. Sending Samantha off to college. Sending you off to college. You know what's next? Huh? It's my fucking funeral!"

It has been said that life is what happens while you are making your plans.

We should all celebrate the life we have. It may not be exactly what we wanted, or what we were expecting, but it is ours and it is precious. One day our story will end. May it be a good story. May it have a happy ending.

What's happening to me?

Guardian Spirit Quickremix by dj4star

A year ago I finally turned my back on my career in Social Housing. I had been trying to make my way within an organisation that was trying to reinvent itself, but actually tearing itself apart. This was a painful and bruising experience for me, and I wondered how on earth I had ever got involved with it in the first place.

I had decided to dedicate myself to Social Housing as a way of doing something worthwhile with my life after 20 years of writing computer programs. There were good times working with wonderful caring people to help make life better for some of the less fortunate in the social mix. This made it worth the grind and the knocks, but only just. Being used for target practice by interdepartmental snipers was not a part of my ideal.

But it's an ill wind, etc., and this kicking gave me the impetus finally to cut my ties to Housing and to follow my bliss, and so I got my life back on track. I sold the boat I had bought when the computer work dried up, and enrolled on celebrant training with Green Fuse.

Cut back to the present. I've changed. I'm still changing. As my course work progresses I find myself being drawn into increasingly spiritual realms. I have been watching old interviews with Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and Alan Watts. Poetry, prayers and songs weave patterns of meaning in my head, and I resonate with the rhythms of the stars. I walk on holy ground. Sometimes it feels almost as if I could stretch out my arms and take flight. What's happening to me?

In my head I hear Abba:

I believe in angels
Something good in everything I see
I believe in angels
When I know the time is right for me
I'll cross the stream
I have a dream

...or Spirits Having Flown by the BeeGees:

I'd like to take you where my spirit flies
Through the empty skies we go alone
Never before having flown".

I think of the prayer attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh:

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show Your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.
We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

Book Review: Passages Of The Soul

Passages Of The Soul: James Roose-Evans, Element Books, 1994

The title of this book refers to the transitions, or passages, that occur between the various phases of ones life, and the fact - as stated in the cover notes - that "in our modern world... our own celebration of these fundamental events often amounts to no more than brief, superficial ceremonies", if they happen at all, which in most cases they don't. The author holds that "ritual is an essential part of a balanced, meaningful life".

Roose-Evans, now 86, was a theatre director of some renown with a number of impressive productions, initiatives, books and collaborations to his credit. In this book he writes about his experiences working mainly with young actors and dancers coming through their education in the USA of the 50s and 60s. 

In the opening chapter he sets the stage, drawing on the ideas of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Meister Eckhart. The inner world is just as real as the outside world. "If we are in Tao - that place where all opposites are united - we have an inexplicable effect on our surroundings." This is all good stuff, which fills the reader with excitement and anticipation as he turns to chapter 2.

This is where it all falls down. The whole of the rest of the book is concerned in one way or other with exercises in self-expression for those in the performing arts. Roose-Evans, an inveterate man of the theatre, has fallen into the trap of mistaking theatre-land for the real world. The groups participating in his sessions are required to make meaningful gestures in a rope circle, to spontaneously express their feelings using only their hands or by carrying a bundle of bamboo canes and dropping them. We are told in ecstatic terms of how a singing group established a rapport with a remote African tribe by singing "ah" very loudly. For actual or aspiring performers this must surely be gripping stuff; for the rest of us, the most we can hope for is a fascinating insight into the thespian mentality.

If this had been intended as a primer in expressive dance it would have been a success. Since it set out to be about rite-of-passage rituals it has entirely missed its purpose. We read that you can't just make up a new ritual, that it has to arise from the collective unconscious to be truly meaningful. There follows a list of made-up rituals, some improvised. Roose-Evans seems oblivious to his own pomposity. He tells of how a woman once told him she was going to use his ritual in her workshops: "I was struck speechless because it is an exercise that requires handling with skill and sensitivity".

In fact there are sections and paragraphs here and there that on their own make the book worth looking at for anyone trying to make sense of life. If my criticism is harsh it is only through disappointment; it could have been so much better.

Time Out

Quite recently I attended a funeral for a civic dignitary. The service was exactly what you would expect from the Church of England at its best: a big congregation, organ, hymns, priests, prayers, fulsome praise from family and colleagues. The one whose loss they mourned was a true individual, the kind they don't make any more.

The last few weeks I have been reading, writing thinking and talking about funerals as part of my study to become an independent funeral celebrant. Of late I noticed that on social occasions I would have nothing to say, and end up staring blankly into the distance, as if the whole scene was one I had watched so many times already that I had got bored with it.

By yesterday afternoon I had had enough. Death is like an insidious grey fog that creeps silently over the landscape of your mind, gradually thickening and cutting you off from other people, leaving you alone with your grey thoughts.

It's true that in confronting death you find life, and know it for the first time. But my advice would be this: having found life, hold fast to it.

I do not for one moment regret my decision to embark on this course. Being a funeral celebrant is a huge privilege. To bring comfort to the bereaved, to honour the life that has now gone out, to be the one to commend that soul to God, to eternity, to our memory, is to be human at a level of reality that is beyond the reach of most mortals. I will walk over fire and water. I will go up to the mountain.

But I will also celebrate life, in all its hope and fear, all its richness and trouble, all its beauty.

I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance
Never settle for the path of least resistance
Living might mean taking chances
But they're worth taking
Loving might be a mistake
But it's worth making...
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance

(Songwriters: SANDERS, MARK DANIEL / SILLERS, TIA M.

I Hope You Dance lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC)

In his book "Passages of the Soul", James Roose-Evans says:

We have no rituals for pregnancy, for a miscarriage or still-born child, for a broken marriage, relationship or home; none for a girl's first menstruation, or a boy's coming to puberty; none for the elders of our society. We have let ritual - its power and vitality, its deeper value and significance - almost disappear from our lives.

My task, as I see it, is to put it back again.

A tale of two cemeteries

On Monday I visited two local cemeteries. It was a cold and blustery afternoon, the sun struggling in vain to be glimpsed through the grey.

I drove to a nearby cemetery, and through the stone gateway on to a dead straight service road between rambling forgotten gravestones. On my left a Victorian Gothic chapel loomed, and then another identical one on the right, a couple of hundred yards away. They were each the size of a village church. Tyre tracks around the outside showed they had been attended, but the doors looked resolutely closed, no lights showed, and the phrase "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" sprang to mind.

Another cemetery

I parked the car and strolled around. From a distance a resident cat eyed me suspiciously. The place had the air of a ghost town. One monument about six feet tall was leaning at an angle of 30 degrees, the whole of the grave having subsided alarmingly. No flowers showed their faces this cold Spring day.

I took a pathway beyond a line of trees and found myself in a different area. Here were plenty of new plots, all laid out like slabs of meat in a butcher's shop window, scarcely an inch between them. Flowers kept vigil over the stones like silent mourners. I felt uneasy.

I suddenly realised that it was late afternoon, I was alone, the gates could be closed at any time and I would be locked in, so I headed back to the car with respectful haste and departed, exiting the gates with a sigh of relief.

Cemetery Gates by LknPL on DeviantArt

But I felt sorry that my visit had been so perfunctory, so I drove on to a village cemetery a few miles away.

Holt  cemetery stands opposite the church at the edge of the village. Nonetheless it is a municipal cemetery, not a church graveyard. The sign on the iron gateway says it is  the "New" cemetery, but the headstones are dated at least as far back as 1936. It is not large, but there are still some empty plots.

Graves nestle over a grassy bank, all tended with care. Daffodils were in bloom in clusters and strings, and many of the graves had fresh flowers or growing flowers. One had evidently been only recently filled, loose earth and cut flowers in a mound. Another stone for a man who died at the age of twenty showed the emblem of a motor-bike. Was this his passion, or the one that killed him? It doesn't say. Birds sang, the church looked on.

As I came away, I felt a deep sense of peace and tranquility. If I had to spent eternity anywhere, it would be here. This feeling persisted for hours after, and I was put in mind of the custom in the East to venerate the tombs of holy men. The tombs of the great Sufi poet Rumi, and of Hazrat Inayat Khan, who brought Sufi wisdom to the West, are visited by thousands of pilgrims, who simply want to be near to the resting place of these saints, to taste their beautiful persisting presence and peace, to be inspired.

The tomb of Hazrat Inayat Khan