Facilitate your own Family ceremony
Your next anniversary, birthday, graduation, funeral or wedding can provide your family and friends with a profound experience of spiritual connection and sharing love. You and your collaborators can make it happen.
Our families and friendship circles need love and as a society we need greater connection to spirit. It is time for those with the potential talent to bring persons together for honest sharing, to step forward and serve as facilitators of ceremony.
What does a ceremony look like? Let me use the graduation of your niece from college as an example.
Over two dozen family members have gathered to celebrate her graduation. Before dinner you call people together for a ceremony circle. You welcome everyone on behalf of your niece and explain that the group is going to share an honoring ceremony for her. As part of your welcome, you invite grandmother to begin with a prayer to initiate the ceremony, and you end the prayer, emphasizing how everyone is present to honor our niece and reinspire each other to continue seeking to become their best selves. You follow by inviting your niece and her parents to share their welcome, then you invite the group to share any words of honor or congratulations to your niece.
Given the tone that was established, family will find themselves sharing deep words of appreciation and respect to your niece and parents, and hopes for the other young people of the family. After a number of persons have shared, you facilitate the closing by asking everyone to join hands to feel the family power, and you invite each person to share “a word or phrase” of what they hope for your niece. The group will hear words like “love,” “success,” “health,” “happiness,” “fun,” “family feels good,” and so forth. Finally, you close with a prayer and then invite everyone to share hugs with at least 3 others before they move on for dinner.
The result of the ceremony is greater sharing of family love and a deepening of the family tradition to honor and respect each other. Our families need such nurturance and it may be your calling to provide the leadership.
Here are the basics:
Preparation
- Consider what you desire to achieve with the ceremony and who and what you need to make it meaningful for you and others.
- Bring key persons together days before the gathering to develop the plan and enlist support. In our Chicano tradition, we often use the drum to bring people together and burn white sage to initiate ceremonia. We frequently establish an altar, or inspiration table, which may include photos of ancestors or other loved ones whose spirits we might want to invite to the ceremony. Making decisions about the ceremony in advance enables necessary preparation to occur before the event.
Ceremony
- Your role is to facilitate, to make the ceremony flow. Have a clear plan and be open to guidance from the Creator and circumstances that invite changes in the plan.
- Provide a joyful welcome that explains the purpose and what will be happening. Invite words to be shared from significant people like the hosts, elders, and the persons to be honored. Help the group keep a focus on the intent of the ceremony, which sometimes requires reminding participants to keep their words brief and from the heart.
- Model brevity and sharing from the heart.
- Provide for a positive closing. Before the group’s energy begins to wane, move to end the sharing. If the group feels open, seek to end with a closing circle in which every person is invited to share one word of hope or feeling. Finally close with a prayer and an invitation for all to share hugs.