On Becoming a Celebrant

A dear friend asked me to marry her. Not a direct proposal; she asked me to be the one standing up the front saying the words while she married someone else, and I said yes of course. Turns out what it required was studying, assessments, roping friends into video role plays, and dealing with the Attourney Generals Office to become a legally registered human who can now marry people, all so I could do this one specific thing for this one specific woman I love. I became a celebrant because she asked, I don't think I've been handed a bigger honour than that in this whole strange career of mine (aside from supporting my amazing sister to bring my incredible niece into the world).

What I didn't expect as I embarked on this, was how much it would feel like an extension of the work I already do, creating rooms with people while they let themselves be witnessed in a state they don't usually let anyone see, except this time nobody's crying because of a somatic release and everybody's crying because two people found each other and are about to promise things to one another in front of everyone they've ever loved, which if you think about it for more than four seconds is completely unhinged and also a very human thing we do.

“A dear friend asked me to marry her...”

Years ago I said something to a partner about the gap I could see, that there were people out there wanting spiritual, alternative unions, ceremonies out in the forest, rituals with real sacredness and depth to them, that could still stand up legally, and how there wasn't anyone doing that properly. It wasn't a dream I carried around for years waiting to achieve, but perhaps it was just me noticing a shape in the market that made sense to me, the way you notice things when your whole life is already built around reverence for ritual, for ceremony, for the specific power of a moment that's been held with care. The conversation was one data point in a much longer pattern of me finding ceremony sacred, long before I had any legal standing to run one.

I think what pulled me toward saying yes to her, and toward everything the yes turned into, is the same thing that pulled me toward this whole career of sitting with bodies and the things they carry, which is that I have never gotten bored of watching people arrive at their own truth in real time. A wedding is just another room where that happens, if you let it be. Most people think a celebrant's job is to read the words off the page in a voice steady enough that nobody notices the microphone crackling, and sure, that's part of it, but the actual job is closer to holding a frame around a moment so big that the two people inside it can't hold it themselves. You become the scaffolding, you become the shepherd, and the thing that lets them just be there, fully, dropping into their own devotion.

There's a comedy to it too that I'm looking forward to, too. The dog that won't stop barking during the vows, the best man who forgets the rings are in his other jacket, the grandmother in the front row who decides, audibly, that this is either the most beautiful thing she's ever seen or a scandal. I suspect I'll love that part as much as the tender part, maybe more, because it'll remind me that ritual was never meant to be sterile - it's meant to hold real, messy, life.

“ritual was never meant to be sterile - it's meant to hold real, messy, life, in all it’s sacredness”

Before I started any of my study years ago I would have said ceremony and embodiment were different things, that one was public and performative and the other was private and deep. The last decade, and now this has thoroughly dismantled that for me. Standing up in front of a hundred people and asking them to witness two other people commit to each other is its own kind of somatic event. You can feel the room's nervous system shift. You can feel the exact second the vows land in someone's chest instead of just their ears. Most of what I'll do won't be the forest ritual, alternative ceremony version I once described to a partner, but I love knowing I have the range for it if someone comes to me wanting exactly that. The capability is there, available, part of what I can gladly and graciously offer.

When I started my celebrancy study, I thought I would only ever to do this once, for her, and now I get to keep doing it. The qualification doesn't expire the day she says I do. It just sits there afterwards, available, which means somewhere down the line I get to stand in front of someone else's people and hold that frame for them too, all because one friend asked me for something I would never have said no to.

It started with one yes to one friend, and now that's enough of a reason to keep saying it.

If you’re getting married - let me be there with you.
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