The Quiet Pull Toward Ceremony Work: How to Tell If It’s Curiosity or a Calling

A celebrant’s honest take on the feeling that keeps tugging at you, and what to do about it.

You went to a funeral, and something shifted. Maybe it was a goodbye so generic that you left certain you could do better. Maybe it was the opposite, a service that finally got a person right, and you found yourself thinking, I could do that. Or maybe it started with your own loss, and somewhere in the grief a quiet thought took root and wouldn’t quite leave.

If any of that sounds familiar, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone. The pull toward ceremony work brings more people to this calling than you’d think. The hard part is knowing whether what you’re feeling is passing curiosity or whether you’re genuinely called to celebrant work.

Those empty, could-have-been-anyone services even have a name. I wrote about them in an earlier post, Bad Goodbyes, the goodbyes that name the dates but somehow miss the person. A lot of people tell me that sitting through one of those, or reading that post, is exactly when the thought first arrived: I could do this differently.

What the Pull Actually Feels Like

It rarely shows up as a thunderclap. For most people, it’s quieter than that.

It’s reading an obituary and rewriting it in your head. It’s being the one friends ask to say a few words at the gathering, and finding that you don’t dread it the way everyone else does. It’s noticing, at service after service, exactly what was missing and exactly what would have made it land.

For some, the pull shows up inside a job that already sits close to this work. If you’re a death doula, a hospice nurse, a funeral home staffer, or a chaplain, you may walk with families right up to the ceremony, then watch someone else step in to lead the part that matters most. Plenty of celebrants started exactly there, wishing they could carry the family the rest of the way.

Some people feel it as relief, a sense that there’s finally a name for work they’ve been doing informally for years. Others feel it as a low, persistent hum, the kind of thought that comes back on the drive home and again at two in the morning.

None of those feelings are proof of anything on their own. But taken together, over time, they’re worth paying attention to.

Curiosity or a Calling? A Few Honest Questions

Here’s the difference, in plain terms. Curiosity is interested in the idea of the work. A calling is willing to do the work itself, including the parts that aren’t comfortable.

You don’t have to answer these perfectly. Just notice which way you lean.

• When you picture leading a service, are you drawn to the spotlight, or to the family in the front row? The work is about them, not you.

• Can you sit with someone else’s grief without rushing to fix it? Holding hard feelings steady is most of the job.

• Are you willing to write, and rewrite, until the words sound like the person and not like a template?

• Does the idea of meeting strangers in the worst week of their lives feel meaningful, or mostly draining?

• Would you keep doing this even on the days it asks more of you than you expected?

If you read those and felt something settle rather than deflate, that’s a signal. Curiosity fades when the work gets real. A calling tends to lean in.

A Bit of My Own Path

I didn’t arrive here in a straight line. I spent more than 20 years in local government before this work ever crossed my mind.

Then I went to work at a funeral home here in Central Michigan, and I started paying attention. I heard a lot of services from where I sat in my office, and too many of them felt like a routine to get through, the same words no matter who had died.

At the same time, I watched more and more families in my community arrive without a church to call, no pastor who knew their loved one, and no tradition that fit. Some had drifted from their faith years ago. Some never believed in the first place, and didn’t want a service built around words that weren’t theirs. They deserved a real goodbye too, and too often they didn’t get one. That gap is what pulled me in. It turned out the work I was meant to do had been standing right in front of me.

So when I tell you a calling can show up sideways, in the middle of an ordinary job, I mean it.

Mine did.

What a Calling Doesn’t Require

A lot of people talk themselves out of this work for the wrong reasons, so let me clear a few away.

You don’t have to be unshakable. Good celebrants feel things deeply. That’s the point. You learn to stay steady while you feel, which is a skill, not a personality trait.

You don’t have to be a polished public speaker today. Presence matters more than performance, and the speaking grows with practice and training.

You don’t have to have it all figured out. Most of us came to this from somewhere else, a former career, a hard loss, or a service that changed how we saw things. A winding road is the norm here, not the exception.

And you don’t have to quit your life to explore it. Plenty of people begin training while they’re still working, and decide as they go.

If the Pull Won’t Leave You Alone

So what do you do with a feeling like this?

Start by taking it seriously instead of waving it off. Notice when it shows up and what it’s responding to. Talk to someone already doing the work, and ask the unglamorous questions about the hard days, not just the meaningful ones.

And when you’re ready to find out whether the calling holds up under real instruction, get proper training. This work deserves more than a weekend certificate. It deserves depth, ethics, real ceremony practice, and people to learn alongside.

That’s why I teach. As the End-of-Life Instructor at the Celebrant Academy, I help people turn that quiet pull into the actual skills families rely on. The End-of-Life Ceremonies course runs six weeks of live instruction, in small cohorts of 12 students, built for people who believe families deserve better goodbyes and are willing to do the work to deliver them.

You don’t have to commit to a whole new life today. You just have to be honest about the pull, and willing to find out what it’s made of.

Ready to Find Out?

If you’ve read this far, that itself might be telling you something. Curiosity would have wandered off a few paragraphs ago.

If the pull is still there, the next step isn’t a leap. It’s a closer look.

Learn about the End-of-Life Celebrant course at the Celebrant Academy: celebrantacademy.com →

Michelle Sponseller is a Certified Master Celebrant and Certified Funeral Celebrant based in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. She specializes in personalized end-of-life ceremonies, religious, secular, and everything in between, and also officiates weddings and other life-milestone services. She serves as the End-of-Life Instructor at the Celebrant Academy.