Frequently asked questions
How do you work with couples?
I want to know your story, to get a sense of you, to catch the essence of who you are, since only from there can I be confident I can hold the mantle for you. So that's the initiating phone call. Maybe you’ll know straight away, I’m right for you. Maybe you’ll sleep on it but when we know we’re a sure thing, a match, we’re off to the races. Most often I provide a draft ceremony template to begin with, you two knowing right off the bat; nothing set in stone. This has proven time and again a better creativity launchpad than a blank slate! We email back and forth until it’s clear we’ve nailed it. Once we know we’re ready for the big Day you can confidently turn your attention to the other details of the Day.
How did you get into this line of work?!
Matrimony & Officiating - Since 1991
Now we're talking decades(!): Two young people on the staff at our UNICEF PlaNetweavers Treasure Store on Haight Ashbury in San Francisco came to me shyly;
“We're not religious but we're spiritual; we want you to marry us.., on top of Mount Tam.” (Mount Tamalpais, Marin County). That was 1991. From there it went by word of mouth. An array of counter culture, ‘Cultural Creatives’; ‘how 50 million people are changing the world’..;
Those are the people who find me, year in year out.
What are your credentials?
So this is a really interesting one because I come from a lineage of Pentecostal Scots-Irish preachers, from the British Isles. Back in the day, my Mother told me, when she was a child, if women were ‘moved by Spirit to speak the Word’ they spoke. By the time I was born, that practice had been somehow subsumed by the idea that only a man could speak with that ‘Authority’ –So here I am in California in the 1990s and the young couple are choosing me as their minister/celebrant/officiant. They were quite clear; I was the person who should preside. Enter the Universal Life Church for my credential to legally perform that first wedding. And for this institution we have the late Reverend Kirby Hensley to thank;
Universal Life Church — I am ordained in the Universal Life Church.
ULC ministers have the legal right to officiate weddings in the USA, preside over funerals, and perform other religious ceremonies. The founder of the ULC, Rev. Hensley, created the ULC in 1959, of the firm opinion that everyone has a right to their internally directed Path, without (necessarily) recourse to organized religion.. He fought for his convictions in the courts, eventually getting ULC established as its own denomination (as 'non-denominational'), and regularly preached his beliefs across the country until his death in 1999.
The ULC's stated beliefs are as follows:
- Objective: Eternal Progression.
- Goal: A Fuller Life for Everyone.
- Slogan: To Live and Help Live.
- Maxim: "We Are One."
Federal Court ruling (Universal Life Church, Inc. v. United States, 1974).
Rev. Hensley was not the first to assert innate sovereignty: “This conviction has a recognizable ancestor. In seventeenth-century England, George Fox and the early Quakers rejected the paid clergy of their time. Their claim was radical: there is "that of God in every one," so no church and no priest stands between a person and the divine. In a Quaker meeting for worship, there is no pulpit. Anyone may be moved to speak. In a Quaker meeting for business, there is no vote. Instead, the meeting seeks the sense of the meeting: the point at which the group has found a way forward that everyone can stand behind, or at least stand aside for. Replace "the divine" with "the truth about what works," and you have the ethos of open source: no hierarchy, sacred or secular, stands between a person and reality.” –Martin Rausch, author of Finding Light Through the Cracks, 2026.
How much does an officiant cost?
Wedding officiant services from $525, which is: ceremony document preparation, preside on the day, filing of the marriage license with the County Clerk. See Pricing