Civil Celebrants

I could not remember a time when a newsreader had been elevated above bishops at an important state memorial service yet no-one remarked on it in the media. This, I believe, can be read as a direct outcome of the fact that for over three decades Australians have been attending weddings and funerals performed by civil celebrants. If any one factor has prepared us for an easy acceptance of secular ritual, both public and private, it is Lionel Murphy’s reform of the marriage culture.

One of the great secular humanists of Australian politics and Attorney-General in the turbulent Whitlam governments of 1972-5, Murphy’s most enduring legacy is the Family Law Act of 1974 which introduced a dignified no fault divorce. It was also Murphy’s concern that a form of civil marriage be made available that would offer an alternative to the drily bureaucratic procedure of the Registry Office, one that would enable citizens to create their own meaningful rituals.

The received wisdom among pundits on the Whitlam government tends to stress its economic failures. Much less remarked upon is the extent to which it modernised the backward Australian culture of the 1950s, to such a degree that even ten years of John Howard failed to undo those elements of cultural change that Australians had seized upon as their natural right.

Twenty years ago 60% of marriages in Australia were performed by clergy. Today the number of marriages performed by civil celebrants stands at 64% and rising.

The Murphy marriage has become the mainstream.

When Murphy set up the Association of Civil Marriage Celebrants of Australia (ACMCA) he made Dally Messenger its Secretary and official spokesperson. Messenger claims that, contrary to expectations, not all clergy were opposed to the move. ‘Some were fed up,’ he says, ‘with having to marry couples who they knew had no religious convictions and the hypocrisy of the situation bothered them’. Inevitably, secular marriage led to secular funerals, although the first appointees were divided on the issue. Not every marriage celebrant wanted to conduct funerals. When acrimony arose, Messenger went to Murphy and asked for his view on celebrant funerals. Murphy gave them his emphatic endorsement.

By this time Murphy had personally appointed over ninety celebrants and in doing so had made some radical moves. In as era when women clergy were unheard of the majority of Murphy’s appointments were women and it’s Messenger’s view that Murphy’s initiative is an unacknowledged factor in diminishing resistance over time to the idea of women clergy. Many of Murphy’s appointments were also young, some in their mid twenties, and two of them were indigenous.

The majority came from backgrounds of community service, including local government, and they represented both sides of politics. Messenger, who is writing a history of civil celebrancy in Australia - ‘we lead the world’ – says he interviewed Murphy on the subject before his death and on the interview tape Murphy uses the word dignity twenty-six times.

‘That’s what it was all about for him. People should be able to have a dignified marriage ceremony. He wanted to turn the church ceremony on its head so that the client defines the ritual from the bottom up rather than the church imposing a one-size-fits-all from the top down.’

In the 1970s I watched a documentary made by Film Australia on the then Soviet Union. An image that has stayed with me since was of a married couple driving to a newly built dam in order to throw the bridal bouquet over the waters of the spillway. This, I thought, was secular religion: an important rite of passage was marked by a ritual offering to the state at one of its modernist temples, a symbol of Science and Progress. The question of whether Murphy’s new institution might morph into a secular priesthood was fraught from the outset but it tended to focus on the civil aspect rather than the religious.

In researching this article I spoke to six civil celebrants and all were insistent that they were not practising a form of civil religion; they are event managers invested with a specific and narrowly defined legal power, like Justices of the Peace. It’s their role to facilitate an occasion and to stage-manage the details, to advise and not prescribe. ‘The entire ceremony should come from the couple,’ said one celebrant. ‘My role is to try and ensure there are no surprises on the day and to otherwise be as invisible as possible.’ But few couples are equipped to write an entire ceremony from scratch and the celebrant can exert a strong influence on the content.

It’s not surprising that as a former Catholic priest Dally Messenger should have a feel for ritual and his book Ceremonies and Celebrations, something of a celebrant’s bible, offers a number of options, including several sets of vows. Experienced celebrants collect a repertoire of readings and poems that couples can select from, anything from Thomas Aquinas to Mark Twain to Victor Hugo to Michael Leunig and one celebrant of fifteen years experience remarked to me on changing fashions in preferred texts, fashions that offer an intriguing insight into changes in sensibility. ‘For about three years everyone wanted a piece out of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (a novel by Louis de Bernieres, published 1994). Then, suddenly, no-one wanted it.’

In Dally Messenger’s view, the choices that couples make reflect their age and life experience. When Messenger began as a celebrant in the 70s the average age of the bride was nineteen, now it’s around twenty-nine. ‘These couples,’ he says, ‘have been leading independent lives before marriage and they want the words of the ceremony to reflect that. Hence Khalil Gibran is a big favourite, especially the quote about the oak and the cypress standing side by side but not in each other’s shadow.’

Parks can also present problems, especially in regard to potentially unmanageable accoutrements such as the cage of doves or box of butterflies that are released after the wows. ‘The butterflies especially make me nervous,’ said one celebrant. ‘Sometimes they have to be coached out of the box and on one occasion we opened it and they were all dead. The bride burst into tears.’

The desire for meaningful ritual leads to many requests for the unorthodox.

There is the underwater wedding, the nudist ceremony, the hot air balloon nuptial, the Goths in black, the wedding on top of a mountain at dawn to symbolize a new beginning. There is the couple with a love of trains who were married in the National Railway Museum and the two Collingwood supporters who were given permission to be married in the goal square, at half time, in the final game held at Victoria Park with twenty thousand spectators looking on. I’m told that in Sydney there is a specialist Elvis celebrant for those who can’t afford to travel to Graceland or Vegas. Theme weddings remain the exception, however, and most civil weddings retain elements of the church wedding, itself derived from pagan ceremonies.

The walk down the ‘aisle’ (even if the wedding is in a paddock), the giving away of the bride, the attendants, the signing of the register, all of these date from pre-Christian marriage rituals. The civil model has encouraged an increased element of active participation so that, for example, the children from previous unions may be asked to formally consent to the marriage and the assembled guests may be asked to pass the rings around as a form of silent blessing. Even the family dog can be included in the ceremony with the rings attached by ribbon to his collar. Of course there is no inherent reason why much of this can’t be incorporated into church weddings and some churches have attempted to keep up with the times by allowing for the inclusion of non-traditional elements (dogs excepted). Too late: the genie is out of the bottle

The fact that Australians have taken to civil marriage in greater numbers than in the US or UK suggests that this country does indeed have a secular heart, although there is some confusion over this among celebrants.

Some of whom are apt to speak of ‘secular spirituality’ by which they appear to mean standards of ethical behaviour. Perhaps it reflects the long-held belief Australians have in themselves as inherently sceptical of authority, that element of the national myth that arose out of the convict strain and was reinforced by C.E.W. Bean’s creation of the legendary Anzac. Whatever else it is, it is firmly humanist, though in the eyes of some, too much so. To quote from Mary Roddy, a Sydney based celebrant and Justice of the Peace who conducts funerals only: ‘The trends in civil marriage ceremonies clearly reflect the notion of the 'atomic individual' now prevalent in modern democratic societies. This notion thrives on the idea that the individual is like an atom, with no necessary innate connection to a community or society beyond themselves - where each individual is autonomous and has the right to do whatever she or he wants without necessarily having any concomitant responsibility to the society in which s/he lives. Civil marriage ceremonies increasingly reflect this belief. In that sense, they are disconnected from the wisdom that has informed humankind's traditional marriage rituals that accord such respect to the place of marriage as the basic unit of any society, and the special role accorded to the newly married couple within society by virtue of their being married.'

This is an interesting argument in which the modern civil marriage is perceived as having moved closer to the idea of a purely social contract entered into by disengaged subjects who have no concept of any special obligation to something larger than themselves. Roddy drew my attention to a recent piece in The Sunday Telegraph (‘Love you always, or till the contract expires’, 21 June 2009) in which three celebrants were quoted to the effect that in recent years they had observed a tendency for couples to alter their vows to eliminate the commitment for life. Some couples were agreeing to review their marriage after five years, as if it were an experiment, something they might learn from and move on.

Some divorced and middle-aged heterosexual couples are bypassing marriage altogether in favour of commitment ceremonies, often in the belief that this will make their wills uncomplicated, especially in regard to issues relating to property and children. If the couples continue to maintain separate residences they are not classified as de facto, although this has yet to be tested in the courts.

Meanwhile there is controversy in the industry over the dramatic increase in the number of celebrants appointed since 2003 and the inadequacy, in many cases, of their training. In the system initiated by Murphy there was a cap on appointments based on geographic location and population numbers. Appointments were for life, subject to a ‘fit and proper person’ test which required a list of impressive referees and a record of community service. In the late 1990s the Attorney-General’s department initiated a review and the system was changed with the result that the numbers have increased from around 3,500 in 2003 to over 8000 in 2009 (compared to approximately 20,000 ministers of religion).

In 1993 celebrants averaged fifty marriages a year, now they average nine. In addition, since 2003 requirements for appointment have been one unit of a certificate in Marriage Celebrancy and simple ‘fit and proper’ criteria that no longer require a community service background. The outcome has been a proliferation of Registered Training Organisations, now amounting to over fifty, but there is strong criticism among both old and new celebrants of the quality of training in many of these establishments.

None of the recently appointed celebrants I spoke to felt their training had been adequate. Many celebrants are former schoolteachers and media figures, accustomed to managing a crowd, but others are expected to learn on the run. The job is more stressful than it appears, with the celebrant having to micro-manage a hundred details. One Sydney celebrant who has conducted over fourteen hundred weddings took me through an entire marriage ceremony and I was impressed by how much scope for error there is. Indeed there is so much to stay across that many celebrants bring along their own roadie to assist them and you get two for the price of one. And the price is? In 2009 top of the range fees sit at around $1000-$1200 but in many places you can get a celebrant for $400-600. It depends on the demographic.

In 2010 celebrants will have to undergo a minimum training requirement of 13 units known as the Certificate 1V in Celebrancy. This may result in better training but is unlikely to address the issue of over-supply. One of the most respected courses is the Monash University Graduate Diploma in Civil Ceremonies but this is time-consuming and expensive. Why enrol at Monash when another organisation offers a short course that is cheaper and makes minimum demands?

Rona Goold is Director of the Australian Celebrants and Celebrations Network (ACCN) and a former science teacher and health educator. She describes the shift away from the concept of community service to an open market model as having redefined marriage celebrancy as a small business, a move consonant with the ethos of economic rationalism. It’s her view that while the aims of the 2003 review were worthy - to increase the professionalism of marriage celebrants by setting up a formal system of training, ongoing professional development, complaints mechanisms and five year reviews - it could have been achieved by adjusting the old model and refining the system of appointments. Critics of the old model argue that it depended on a network of political patronage and tended to privilege a first-in-last-longest veteran elite.

One thing is clear: these debates are indicative of a vibrant institution at a time when many churches are struggling to attract both clergy and congregation.

What we needed was a neutral person, skilled in the conduct of mourning rituals, to find the words, with the permission of the family, to reflect on the baffling and unbearable mystery that defined this death, and that cautioned us all to think of friendship in a new way, to think of what it might demand of us in the future. What we needed was a civil funeral celebrant.

Since that time, many others have come to the same conclusion and celebrant conducted civil funerals are rapidly becoming the norm.

Some practitioners believe that a good celebrant can be more crucial to a satisfying outcome in the case of a funeral than in a wedding. A wedding is a joyful occasion that can survive a bumbling celebrant but mistakes at a funeral can have dire emotional consequences. The funeral director has charge of a dignified disposal of the body but a conscientious celebrant takes on the responsibility of creating a consoling ritual. Too many funerals leave the participants feeling hollow and the awfulness of funeral parlours is captured in Alan Bennett’s memoir of his aunt’s death (Untold Stories, 2005). ‘The building will be long and low, put up in the sixties, probably, when death begins to go secular... it looks like the reception area of a tasteful factory or the departure lounge of a small provincial airport. … Unsolemn, hygienic and somehow retail, the service is so scant as to be scarcely a ceremony at all, and is not so much simple as inadequate. These clipboard send-offs have no swell to them, no tide, there is no launching for the soul, flung like Excalibur over the dark waters.’ Not only is the deceased dead but so is the ceremony and to quote the US expert on civil ritual, David Oldfield: ‘a dead ceremony is worse than no ceremony at all.’

Clearly the problem with Bennett’s ‘pinched suburban send-off’ is the absence of meaning, especially for the mourners. Where the funeral parlour resembles Bennett’s account, and many do, the celebrant must play a compensatory role. I spoke with a specialist funeral celebrant from an Anglican background who said: ‘People often get angry about church funerals. They might say to me, we had Dad’s funeral in church and it wasn’t about Dad at all, it was about the church. They want something better for Mum but they aren’t sure what “better” means. They look to me to fill the gap.’

In a good civil ceremony it feels like we are participants rather than powerless observers and by participating we experience a truer, more meaningful sense of congregation.

But the greater the mourner participation the lengthier and more involved the preparation. It may involve a long running sheet of eulogies with, say, ten grandchildren under the age of fifteen each making a short speech. It will almost certainly involve a slide show of the dead person’s life (the number of images can exceed a hundred) and the preparation of the main eulogy can take hours. The narrative of an entire life must be put together in a satisfying way and the celebrant must mediate among competing and conflicting memories. In a civil ceremony biography takes the place of a unifying and integrative myth (the Resurrection). The eulogy/narrative must be equal to the task, and since there is no set format for a civil service, no traditional prayers or hymns, the celebrant must ease the family through a welter of stressful decisions. During the service she must act as a psychic net that encompasses the many disparate elements and supports the mourners. To quote one funeral specialist: ‘When everyone goes to water, the celebrant is the keep going factor’.

If issues to do with money and supply are controversial among marriage celebrants they are even more so in the funeral trade. Unlike marriage celebrants, funeral celebrants perform no legal function and hence do not have to be accredited or trained; because of this it’s funeral directors who control the market and pay the celebrant. It’s possible to first choose your celebrant and then approach a funeral parlour but most families go direct to the parlour and use a celebrant recommended by the funeral director. This can make for something of a closed shop and Dally Messenger believes that funeral celebrants are the lowest paid and most exploited people in the funeral industry.

Funeral celebrants cite their preparation time as varying from between seven to thirty hours but funeral directors argue that it is they who stage-manage the setting – the furniture, the flowers, the microphone - and all the celebrant has to do is act as an emcee. In Victoria the Funeral Directors’ fixed ceiling fee hovers at about $440 (in other states it is less) but there are celebrants who will accept as little as $150. Most clergy will do services at parlours for a fee of $180 but Messenger argues that unlike clergy, celebrants do not have a congregation, do not get paid a stipend or receive a free car and petrol, nor are they provided with a house, computer and mobile phone by a congregation.

It’s a fraught area and in August 2007 Messenger was fined $46,000 by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for an alleged attempt at price-fixing. In essence the case revolved around a recommendation Messenger had made that celebrants working in parlours raise their fixed fee by $50 and consider setting an hourly rate. In a somewhat baffling decision by the ACCC the David and Goliath roles were reversed, and Messenger’s fine provoked the ire of many observers of the funeral industry, including lawyer and Victoria’s former Commissioner for Equal Opportunity, Moria Rayner. Messenger no longer conducts funerals because, he says, he rarely puts in fewer than thirty hours and ‘they take too much out of me.’

But there are others, like Rona Goold, who would like to expand their role into that of a civic or community ambassador.

Goold argues that the first appointment of celebrants arose out of a concern for human rights and there is scope for celebrants to play a greater role in this area as community leaders and educators. In 2009 Goold made a submission to the federal government’s current Human Rights Consultation which argues, among other things, for a schools based Ethics and Citizenship Education program, the culmination of which would be a citizenship ceremony in which eighteen year olds were presented with a certificate of citizenship. These ceremonies would be hosted and coordinated by civil celebrants in each electorate, working in cooperation with their federal and state MPs.

The Attorney-General’s Department currently makes available an ‘It’s Your Rights’ package to immigrants and adults learning English but there is no equivalent for new voters, nor a citizenship ceremony for the Australian born. To date Goold has had no response to the idea but given the longstanding resistance to teaching any form of civics in Australian schools it is hard to envisage such a proposal being adopted by governments, at least not until a reforming politician with the zeal of Lionel Murphy comes along to unleash further change.

But let me give the final word to Dally Messenger. Just recently, he told me, he married a young couple in Dandenong who said they wanted two weddings. The first would be in a church ‘for the oldies’ and the second would be a civil ceremony, ‘a proper wedding with a marriage celebrant for all our friends’.

A proper wedding with a marriage celebrant? Lionel Murphy would be proud.