I’ve spent my life working with words. This is why I notice what I notice.
I’ve read and written poetry all my life – I believe in the power of poetry to illuminate, well, everything! – I studied languages and literature at university, worked for many years as a literary translator, and I’m currently writing a long-form piece of my own work.
Across all of that, I’ve been interested in the same question: how language helps us make sense of who we are, what we experience, and how we relate to one another.
That interest is what led me to celebrancy. But I didn’t realise, when I took that first step – phoning one of the very few French celebrant-training companies and hesitantly but eagerly asking for information – how much the concept of ceremony would come to mean to me. I had no idea, then, six years ago, how integral ceremony is to our lives as human beings. We often stumble about, trying to figure out what’s going on and how we can encompass events, digest them, integrate them, and not be consumed by them.
Ceremony is not just a formality. It is a tiny moment in time, during which words are asked to hold something real and personal. They should have an impact on everyone present, not just the marrying couple. Whatever language they happen to be in, they ought to have their place in the script. Any redundant, unnecessary or stowaway words, I ruthlessly chop out of the text!
I believe that ceremony, ceremony rites, are integral to our lives as we experience them; even our most ordinary of days is likely to contain some kind of unexamined rite: pouring tea, or lighting a cigarette (bad! but it definitely has ritual elements about it), or having an afternoon snack with out child in a favourite café. And then there are the big rituals, for birthdays, anniversaries, and of course, weddings. Funeral rites – I’ll talk about those somewhere else, as they are a ritual apart – and possibly, the most meaningful of all.
But to summarise, before I became a celebrant, I had not the faintest idea of the power of ceremony, of ritual, to transform our everyday and our extraordinary moments. Not in a woo way! In a profound and almost improbable manner. As if the need to make meaning out of our existence in some kind of contained way is written into our very bones.
That’s the kind of meaning I like to write into my ceremonies. I take your existence as a couple, and the words that you use in your answers to the many, many questions that I ask you during our ceremony preparation, and I speak them back to you in such a way that, if I do it right, will have the ring of truth about it. Making sense and meaning to everyone present, and most of all, to you.
