HUMAN RITES ~ the right of human beings to ritualize the great passages of life, both personal and communal, for the purpose of healing, transformation and meaning.

I am a liberal minister, trained at the University of Chicago and the Unitarian seminary, but my respect for ritual goes back to my childhood and the Roman Catholic Church where I was raised. The power of ritual and myth was impressed upon me at an early age, and even when I left the church at age 12, I took with me both the instinct for good ritual and the psychological horror of bad ritual – ritual whose content is diametrically opposed to one’s own values, or worse, dead ritual. Growing up with Joseph Campbell as an honorary family member opened my mind to the nature of human rites and their attendant stories and myths,

Over the last thirty years I have trained myself to become, without conscious intent, a RITUAL ELDER. It surprised me to hear Robert Moore (teacher, author, minister) call me by this appellation during an event for the Parliament of Worlds Religions, but he continued to impress upon me the importance of this function in society during my doctoral work with him at Chicago Theological Seminary. I began to recognize how true this was and how truly I had grown into the role. I accepted the mantle of responsibility and wear it now with joy and determination as I move into my own Crone years.

In the fifteen years that I have been working as a minister, I have further refined my approach to ritual and found the intellectual and spiritual structure to support what I do. Ritual is serious and reverential play. It has profound powers to change the way people think, feel and act and even to change the perception of reality – altering long-established patterns. It uses a symbol language of words, images, objects and gestures to effect its result. It may derive part of its strength from drawing upon culturally rich symbols, or it may be peculiarly particular, formed of dream images and personal artifacts as in a ritual-for-one.

Most of my professional work has been of two kinds --- creating and officiating wedding rituals for couples, and, giving seminars and lectures to introduce groups to the beauty and power of myth and ritual. I have an entire website devoted to the wedding work which you may visit by clicking on this link:   www.revreb.com

This site introduces you to the other forms of ritual and myth-making that I do for families, individuals, classes, congregations and conferences in such venues as the pulpit, church hall, town square, riverside, bedside, beach, mountaintop, living room, and concert hall. I invite you to peruse and enjoy and hope that you’ll find something to spark a renewed interest in HUMAN RITES. 

Reverentially yours ~  Rebecca Armstrong

 

 

 

 

Rev. Dr. Rebecca Armstrong is a minister, musician and mythologist. She is a second-generation folk singer and storyteller raised in Chicago by George and Gerry Armstrong, often called “the mom and pop” of the Chicago folk music scene. She appears on numerous recordings and has performed all over the world, including South Africa where she was privileged to open for Nelson Mandela's acceptance speech of a world peace award during the 1999 Parliament of the Worlds Religions. 

 
Joseph Campbell, a close family friend of the Armstrongs, encouraged Rebecca and Gerry to tour a program of Myths to Live By in the Chicagoland schools, which they did for many years. Beginning in 1990 Rebecca worked for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, spearheading their international outreach program and has lectured for its local study groups in placed as far away as Malaysia, Lithuania and Brazil. She has a degree in religion from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a masters of divinity from Meadville-Lombard, the Unitarian-Universalist seminary and completed her doctorate at Chicago Theological Seminary in 2004. She served in two UU churches before striking out on her own as a freelance minister with an ecumenical urban-based ministry in Chicago.


She co-founded The Friends of Compassion in 1999 and helped lead a group of pilgrims to India where they met with the Dalai Lama and initiated a service project for the women's center in Saddun, a small Indian village. Locally, the group adopted a family from South America seeking political asylum and supported them for two years until they found work and attained permanent resident status (the green card!) In 2003 she began a program of pilgrimage called The Soul of the City which she took to Brazil, Mexico and Ecuador.


In Chicago, Rebecca has created a ministry serving interfaith and non-denominational couples seeking to be married. She has created over 600 ceremonies – each one unique – and especially enjoys performing Christenings for babies born to these couples! As an outgrowth of this work in the area of relationships, Rebecca has begun a ministry of Soul Care in couples’ mediation for people seeking help with the underlying spiritual issues in marital crisis, separation and divorce.


You can learn more about Rebecca by visiting her websites: 

www.revreb.com

www.citysoul.net

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FEES FOR SPEAKING, PREACHING, WORKSHOPS & RITUALS

Rebecca’s fee for creating and performing most rituals is $500 in the Chicago area.

Sunday services are $250 (I am happy to work creatively within your church’s budget)

Lecture/Performances are $500 Workshops are $500 per day plus expenses

If the engagement takes place in the Chicago area there is a travel fee of $.50 per mile/roundtrip. If the engagement requires travel outside of Chicago, we can discuss travel and accommodation expenses. In most instances, it is cheaper for me to fly in and take home hospitality rather than to drive and charge you for food and motels.

 

CONTACT REBECCA:


toll free telephone:      888.80.RITES

 
email:                 ceremonies@aol.com

 

postal address:

1555 Sherman Ave #111

Evanston, IL 60201
 

The mythogenetic zone today is the individual in contact with his own interior life, communicating through his art with those ‘out there.’

--Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, p. 93

 

One of Campbell’s most intriguing theories was that mythogenetic zones--those intersections in actual time and place where a group of people shared both the historical need for a regenerative mythology and the spontaneous language of a deep signal code--were impossible in this day and age of dissolving symbol systems and outmoded cosmologies. His claim in Creative Mythology was that since “in our world there exist no more closed horizons within the bounds of which an enclave of shared experiences might become established, we can no longer look to communities for the generation of myth.” Out of this conclusion he drew his correlative truth stated above, that the only true mythogenetic zone lies in the creative soul matrix of the individual.

Rebecca Armstrong is collaborating with MYTHOS MEXICO (Pedro Servin Fernandez and Maria Rodriguez) to create a worthy container for incubating the new dreambody of the Americas. In preparation for the 500th anniversary of the colonization of the New World, we must bring deep mythic resources -- the kind found only in Big Dreams -- into the collective cauldron of wisdom. In January of 2006 there will be a workshop given for the Mythological Roundable in Denver, Colorado (with Sydney Solis of Mythic Yoga) to further the work, leading to a multi-national weekend workshop in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in February of 2006. If you are interested in participating, please contact Rebecca for further details.

To read the full article about this, please click on this DREAMBODY link. 

toll free phone:   888.80.RITES               email:   ceremonies@aol.com