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Mixed BlessingsAre secular life ceremonies the wave of the future?

By Michael KressPosted Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2004, at 7:27 AM ET

Perhaps it was bound to happen: Spiritual seekers who left churches and synagogues for the freedom of an independent path are finding it's lonely out there. When it comes to life's big moments—weddings, births, funerals—a religious ceremony can be a, well, religious experience. But instead of going back to church, some people are finding nonreligious means of celebrating life's significant events. Though not without their challenges, these secular rituals can make a significant contribution to the 21^st-century quest for spiritual meaning.

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The rituals are the work of a growing number of "secular officiants" who create religion-free life-cycle rituals commemorating everything from birth to death, puberty to menopause. Advertising through Web sites like SecularCeremonies.com and ARiteToRemember.com, they attract those who have abandoned traditional religion—atheists and the "spiritual but not religious" alike—along with those who feel abandoned by religion—for example, unmarried parents.

Different approaches to this endeavor range from the secular humanist who does not mention God in her ceremonies and refuses to include Jewish or Christian rituals or Bible readings, to the officiant who will only include rituals that somehow figure in her clients' lives or heritages.

Ceremonies by Terri Mandell-Campfield take the former approach. There's typically an exchange of vows (for a wedding) and an appropriate ritual for the occasion, borrowed from any number of traditions aside from Judaism or Christianity, which she shuns because, she says, her clients are seeking rituals they can't find in church or synagogue—and many are "really angry about the religions they were brought up with." Instead, there might be "handfasting," which her Web site defines as "an ancient Celtic wedding ritual in which the couples' hands are tied together with a ceremonial ribbon or cloth." Or it might include "calling the directions," a commonly adopted Wiccan (neo-pagan) and Native American custom in which North, South, East, and West are summoned to bless and aid those involved in the ceremony.

The biggest drawback of this approach is that pulling rituals from various traditions and performing them out of context risks distancing them from the realities of participants' spiritual lives. They may evoke the intended visceral reactions—pushing the right emotional buttons and giving the proceedings the solemnity they deserve—while leaving little below the surface. It is the officiants' and the participants' challenge to ensure that handfasting or calling the directions is more than just a nice thing they borrowed from the Celts or pagans.

Ann Keeler Evans represents the second approach—insisting that rituals have some basis in her clients' spiritual lives or family heritage. For a wedding between a Sikh man and an Irish-Catholic woman, for instance, the ceremony included the lighting of a Catholic unity candle (slightly modified: The couple didn't extinguish their individual candles after lighting the joint flame, as is the tradition) and a Sikh ritual in which everyone is given cooked grain as a sign that the temple feeds and blesses all.

These rituals are made rich by drawing on participants' personal histories, but obviously they aren't for those looking to flee their heritage and truly do something that is theirs and only theirs. Keeler Evans says clients often ask about incorporating symbols or rites they've seen elsewhere—including, once, a reality television show—but she won't do it unless it has particular significance for that person. This approach is far from traditional but it allows participants to connect to their—or at least their family's—past. The risk of pulling rituals out of contexts is lessened, though not eliminated, by their basis in the participants' lives, and it remains in the hands of these leaders and their clients to ensure a balance between tradition and what is personally meaningful.

What sets these secular celebrations apart from traditional rituals is their focus on the individuals. In the past, people didn't need ritual to speak to them personally; if it was part of their religion, it was inherently meaningful. Today, with confidence in our institutions eroding, authority and belief come—for many people—from self and personal experience.

The spirituality-without-religion movement has been criticized by many in the religious world as being hopelessly narcissistic—too, or even exclusively, focused on the self. And it does seem like individual choice has become, for some at least, a religion in and of itself.

But it's also possible to overstate this point. It's not as if traditional religions are immune from our culture's emphasis on the individual. That emphasis itself is an outgrowth of Protestantism. And today, in this country, the most up-and-coming faiths are those that tap into this individual-centric worldview. It's no coincidence that evangelical Christianity is ascendant in the Protestant world just as many boomers and their children are seeking "personal spirituality" outside of churches and synagogues and through secular ceremonies. Like the "secular spiritual" crowd, evangelicals are all about the individual, although for them the religious life centers around the born-again experience and the resulting personal relationship with Christ.

Religious and secular officiants agree that community is vital for life-cycle ceremonies. For secularists, community is made. They are defined by a fluid set of friends, co-workers, neighbors. Society's norm no longer boasts the community pastor as surrogate parent whose intimate knowledge of a family allows him to perform all their life-cycle ceremonies in a personalized way. But secular officiants can't step into this role; the community they're ministering to is so loosely defined. To compensate for this, they may insist on multiple meetings with clients or follow a family through the life-cycle, officiating at its weddings, birth ceremonies, funerals, and other events.

A sense of history is likewise central in making life-cycle ritual meaningful. That's an inherent problem for secular officiants, whose ceremonies are mostly about do-it-yourself spirituality. Keeler Evans addresses this through her insistence that rituals have some basis in her clients' lives; others face the challenge of ensuring their ceremonies somehow tap into this. Even those who've rejected religion are shaped by their, and their family's, past, and without some connection between rite and participant, the ceremony risks being little more than performance.

But if the secular-ceremony movement has its challenges, it also has its promise.

For one thing, secular officiants cater to people who don't feel at home in churches and synagogues. Their clientele is largely interfaith or same-sex couples wanting to get married, unmarried parents seeking to commemorate their babies' births, and others whose situations leave them outside the tradition in which they were raised.

Additionally, secular officiants are creating ceremonies for previously unmarked moments like divorce, menopause, or buying a first house—filling in what religious studies scholar Ronald Grimes calls "a big barren zone between most people's weddings and funerals."

It's clear that rituals are central to human life. Ever since early humans did a dance of gratitude for the food they hunted, humans have been celebrating life's high points and marking its low ones. The scholarly jury is out on whether humans have an actual innate need to ritualize; but even if it's not biological, the pull can be intense.

These days, anyone with Internet access can be legally ordained by the Universal Life Church. The challenge, then, is to create ceremonies that rise above the cliched and hokey and to fashion ceremonies that are meaningful, personalized, and imbued with a strong sense of community and history. Given that many people have fled religion in part because of rituals that seemed hollow, secular officiants need to keep what they do original and not allow anything to become routine. If they can manage that, they'll have made a valuable contribution to the new religion of personal spirituality.

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Michael Kress writes about religion and spirituality for a variety of publications and is the editor in chief of MyJewishLearning.com.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Kress' article about wacky secular "life cycle ceremonies" confirms the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton's observation that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they belive in everything.

According to Kress, one can incorporate "Celtic" ritual, Wiccan ritual (which itself is really a fabrication anyway), or borrow from reality t.v. Evidently, there is an enormous vacuum in the lives of secularists capable of sucking in any inane crap that flies by.

Frued asserted in "Totem and Taboo" and "The Future of an Illusion" that religion is mass neurosis. All of this has underscored my belief that Frued was sort of correct, in the inverse. Atheism, agnosticism and other narcissistic world views are self centered and very individualized neuroses.

--MarkBrown

(To reply, click here)

My Mom and Dad made Ward and June look like Sid and Nancy. They brought us kids up, sending us to The Gospel Hall, a Plymouth Brethren group that made the Fundamental Baptist church we later attended and whose high school I attended look like a gang of Unitarians. Still, my folks were married by a Justice of the Peace; there was no criticism or concern voiced by the faithful at the church when they chose to get married at the courthouse (in 1950).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is nothing in scripture to suggest that churches or ministers have to be involved in weddings. Churches aren't in any doctrinal way empowered to marry people; where ever that tradition came from, it didn't come from sacred text. It's simply a human tradition, right? Even if you accept the bible as the infallible divine guidebook for life, getting a church wedding is a matter of personal preference, a matter of taste.

--Tracker

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While it is true that many in the most liturgical of settings still may be pressured to follow a narrow liturgy in weddings, funerals, etc., Kress is eons behind the time when it comes to such ceremonies. Most Protestant ministers have performed widely varied services and have recognized the value of individualization to enhance significance for years. For my part, I have performed weddings in every conceivable setting with every conceivable dress code, etc. (within the parameters of decency, that is!) Many in the religious community take the time to counsel and tailor ceremonies to the couples themselves, drawing from the experience, their values, their traditions, and their preferences. I have presided/devised ceremonies to bless houses, property, children, etc. and agree that - within reason - such rituals can foster a sense of mission and unity for those involved…

Many of us want to harmonize every aspect of our lives, and such rituals can be beneficial in that quest. A wise minister/priest recognizes that "extra-Biblical" is not the same as "anti-Biblical" when it comes to such rituals and desires. The more we can assist our "flock" in harmonizing faith with life, the better it is for all of us. Kress is correct in noting that a growing new group of secular or pseudo-religious resources are available for us in such endeavors, but it seems to me he is incorrect if he believes this is a sign of something radical, new, or particularly newsworthy.

--jd-14too

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That "ancient Celtic wedding ritual" is more likely the nuptial equivalent of an Urban Myth. I can't tell you -- well, maybe I can -- how much mystic balderdash is attributed to the "ancient Celts" without any scholarly substantiation. I realize it is handy for white people to think they can draw on a kinda-like-us spiritual tradition as deep as Hinduism and as colorfully ritualistic as the Balinese, but you know, it's tough to find the documentation. By the time of Jesus, those "ancient Celts" had morphed into about a dozen warring cultures, whose common cultural thread was an obsession with rank, lineage, and feats of arms. Yeah, sure, they were lively, threw great parties, and had a uniform reputation among the Greeks and Romans for drinking too much. And yeah, they had some marvelous artisans, especially in metalworking. But there is a stark dearth of evidence that the religions of the Celtic cultures featured the sweet-hearted, nature-loving, Ur Transcendentalism that shows up at today's weddings….

The REALLY cool Celtic stuff is when the old artistic patterns were entwined among the artifacts and literature of the new religion. But that's another story, to be told at undue length when The Fray finally gets around to serving drinks...

--JimmytheCelt

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(9/23)

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