Handbook for Celebrants: Baptism, initiation, marriage, divorce and funeral. Practice and theory of the most important transition rituals.

By Robert Maehr

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Verein Celecert
• Release date: Jan 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9783952489888

Book preview

Preface

Working as a celebrant is a demanding and the task requires responsibility, empathy, sensitivity and mental resilience. As in all professions, techniques can be acquired, methods adopted and theories implemented. This handbook is intended to provide an appropriate basis.

In the field of employment, it is helpful to draw on personal life experience. But even personal experience does not protect the celebrant from the danger of personal isolation due to lack of self-reflection and feedback. This in turn harbours the danger of uncertainty and can promote an exaggerated and unreflected sense of security, which often has a negative effect on the quality of work. In order to prevent this danger, it is necessary that celebrants regularly exchange information and have their performances checked from time to time. This process of introspection and supervision is well known from comparable occupations (social workers, pedagogues, etc.), where it has proven its worth and is well established

About the Book

Another handbook, another guide - why? In a time when a large number of guidelines and compendia on relevant questions of life and the banal everyday arise, the question is justified. So why write about a topic that is as old as mankind and has already been extensively documented?

The author was persuaded to write this book for two main reasons. On the one hand, there was no literature with practical instructions. On the other hand, the existing literature is strongly secular.

In order to keep the scope as limited as possible, the focus was placed on the five world religions—keeping in mind that similar rituals are practiced in many other religions and religious communities.

Another incentive to write this book is the lack of binding conventions for the professional activities of celebrants. To this day, there are no guidelines and definitions for nondenominational priests in Europe, as the profession of a celebrant has not yet been officially established. Without these fundamental principles, however, it is not possible to arrange and establish binding and universally valid quality standards.

However, the lack of a foundation to date does not mean that the information and facts for this book cannot come from other sources. It can be assumed that a large part of the specialist knowledge has already been compiled in various articles and has partly also been published. Expert knowledge is here reactivated from practice, structured, and made accessible in a condensed form and readily understandable language.

The Reader

It goes without saying that this handbook has been written for both aspiring and trained celebrants. The question of who belongs in this target group will be examined in more detail later on. To put it simply, they are priests who are not subordinate or affiliated to any religious organization such as a church. They could also be described as freelancers. This occupational group, which is only slowly establishing itself in secularised societies, is currently in a professional vacuum. This is due to the absence of a superordinate governing organization (analogous to the church or the state), which means that there are also no rules, guidelines, and sacraments. The aim of this publication is to provide celebrants with an application-oriented basis for practising their profession. The objective of a uniform and recognised job certification is to ensure a serious and professional basis on which customers can rely, because trust is a basic prerequisite for this business.

Trained theologians and lay preachers can also engage with this text—with the prospect of potentially offering, planning and carrying out non-ecclesial rituals and thus becoming active as celebrants.

In addition, potential customers and interested parties are invited to discuss the topic. Rituals, and in particular the transitional rituals described here, must not be secret actions. On the contrary, it is important to make these rituals visible to the public. Furthermore, the work and activities of celebrants should be better understood thanks to greater transparency. Hence, it is desirable to make the manual accessible to a broad readership.

About the Author

Robert Mähr was trained as a celebrant in Switzerland at Fachschule für Rituale. Since the term celebrant was not tangible and hardly known at that time, master of rituals was widely used. In this function he developed and carried out countless rituals. During this time, the trained pedagogue, technical merchant, IT specialist, and management consultant was always bothered by the fact that his new profession was not rooted in anything. Furthermore, the term master of rituals does not only require a great deal of explanation, the name sometimes even carries negative connotations in the western world. Alternatively, the term leader of rituals was used. However, this does not cover the entire spectrum offered by the author. The desire to put an end to this undefined state increased. Coincidence played an important role in the search for a suitable name: When an old friend from Mexico explained that he had completed an education as a celebrant in the USA, the author realized that something similar had to be built up in Europe. In order to achieve uniformity, the standards must first be established. This is how the idea of a manual was born.

Gender-specific Formulations

To facilitate the flow of reading, the author mainly used the plural form celebrants with the corresponding gender-neutral pronoun they. This does not mean that the tasks need to be performed by multiple celebrants, but that the advice concerns all celebrants who find themselves in such a situation. In deliberately choosing gender-neutral language, the author wishes to distance himself from religious organisers who deny women the access to priesthood.

Handbook for Celebrants

Baptism, initiation, marriage, divorce, and funeral. Practice and theory of the most important transition rituals.

Robert Mähr

2nd edition

Ebook edition, 2019

Verein Celecert, St. Gallen, Switzerland

Cover design: Moritz Maehr

Cover picture © Robert Maehr

© Celecert

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-3-9524898-8-8

www.celecert.org

The Profession of the Celebrant

The term celebrant is used differently in various cultures and religions and therefore has different meanings. The following definition applies to the further use of the term:

Origin of the Term Celebrant

In all religious communities, people with special spiritual abilities or secret knowledge are designated and selected to carry out and pass on their own teachings. Often these people also have knowledge of traditional specific ritual procedures and actions, i. e. they are initiated, often consecrated. Believers worship these designated specialists as priests, shamans, druids, gurus etc. who often represent a link between a superior (divine) power and the religious community.

In various pre-Christian cultures, people who distinguished themselves with supernatural or inexplicable acts were ordained as shamans or priests in initiation rituals, including women who could also hold this position. In this function they acted as healers, fortunetellers, advisers, mediators, and spiritual leaders and were responsible for observing and carrying out the rituals.

Various rulers took over the religious leadership themselves (as emperors) in their cultures or they appointed priests for this purpose. In some religious communities, a separate priesthood with clearly defined rights and duties has arisen as a consequence . This priestly