THE DIPLOMA OF FUNERAL CELEBRANCY
The international College of Celebrancy was founded in 1995. The course has been written by a team of at least eighteen experienced celebrants, some of whom have been operating in this profession for over thirty years.
Graduates of the College of Celebrancy established the USA Celebrant Foundation.They were an Integral part of establishing civil Celebrancy in New Zealand. The civil marriage celebrant program developed in Australia on sound principles, so that by 2008, 65% of all weddings in Australia were conducted by civil celebrants -- and most of the funerals. With clients, the starting point for all civil celebrants is secular, though many religious people choose civil celebrants because of the totally personal nature of a celebrant funeral.
None of this can be done well without thorough and proper education and training. One of the problems which plagues Celebrancy is that many consider that they do not need skills to create and prepare a funeral — with predictably disastrous results. Reports of disastrous funerals, which exacerbate grief, are almost come daily to most professional celebrants.
All good education and training is the distilled experience of people who are successful in the field, and who have made important discoveries, which come to be essential to the craft. A good funeral celebrant should be thoroughly conversant with the nature of grief. He/she should have an awareness of the cultural and religious streams. which makes up her society and community, and consequently, totally convinced of the importance of focused listening skills. He or she must be knowledgeable in the appropriate resources of music, poetry, prose, symbolism, and choreography. She should be convinced of the psychological need for meaningful ceremonies of substance both for secular and religious people. Regrettably, many civil funeral celebrants get carried away with the appreciation they get from even minimal personalism in a ceremony — without any awareness they could do much better. The College pursues "best practice" principles.
Central to the work of the civil funeral celebrant, is the appropriate creation of the eulogy or biography. Grieving people need to know that the tribute is proper, and that it has a certain genealogical and chronological fullness. It must be honest without giving offence and, above all, must be fully and completely checked with the client family. It is obvious that to do this job well one must have a certain skill and training in creative writing, the ability to speak in public with feeling, but without inappropriate drama, and should have the sources and resources to create a ceremony which will be, for many years, a source of consolation for the bereaved.
The current International College of Celebrancy Diploma in Funeral Celebrancy teaches that there is no such thing as a short cut to good funeral. We are given one chance, and one chance to "get" the funeral ceremony right. It is not moral to train by experimenting on the job — a process the college condemns as "victim-based learning".
A fully personally created ceremony is no easy task, and should not be taken on lightly. The College considers that its members and graduates should adopt the principle of continuous self-assessment, peer assessment, and learning. They do this through their college studies which have a sound component of "field work" observing and reporting on other celebrant (and religious) funerals of all kinds, and practising ceremony preparation to an acceptable level, before they take on the responsibility of such an important task.
© D.Messenger 1995-2011