Meet Lucinda
Lucinda Martin is an ordained Interfaith Minister, spiritual life coach, celebrant, and lifelong student of the world’s wisdom traditions. She is passionate about ceremony and ritual, viewing them as “the glue keeping heart strings together.”
Reverend Lucinda Martin · Ordained Interfaith Minister since 2009
A Little About Lucinda
Lucinda studied Interfaith and Inter-Spiritual teachings at One Spirit Interfaith Seminary in New York. Upon her ordination in 2009 she began offering wedding officiant services and founded the online interfaith directories Vows & Kisses, Wedding Officiants and More and Graceful Mournings — professional celebrants providing support for funerals, celebration-of-life services, and grief through all of life’s transitions.
She serves folks who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious” and are looking for a non-denominational or multi-faith officiant. It is of great importance to her to embrace and support LGBTQ people, atheists, and agnostics. She offers a variety of rites of passage — baby blessings among them — and has written and facilitated workshops in support of creative expression, healing, and spiritual growth.
She also offers workshops to interfaith practitioners who want to begin or grow a wedding officiant or professional celebrant business, teaching business, marketing, and networking skills alongside the craft of creating personalized ceremonies with a focus on meaningful, memorable ritual.
Her studies of world religion and Indigenous spiritual traditions have deepened her passion for symbolic ritual. In her experience, including a ritual in a wedding or a celebration of life draws family and guests into a deeper connection with one another and with God.
Rituals become a portal that creates an opening — an understanding — of forgiveness, gratitude, connection, and love.
While serving as a Center for Spiritual Living Licensed Practitioner and raising her five wonderful sons in Aptos, Santa Cruz County, she worked as an executive assistant supporting C-level executives of Fortune 500 companies. She was a hospice volunteer and served as executive assistant to the director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Sonoma County.
Having studied conversational Spanish, it brings her great joy to now offer bilingual ceremonies. She provides officiant services throughout Northern California’s Napa and Sonoma wine country, Bodega Bay, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz County — and now includes officiant and workshop services in Colorado Springs and Denver, Colorado.
The Calling — The Yearning
Walking to elementary school, Cindy — Lucinda — passed a huge courtyard wall, laced with lovely vines and capped with mission-style terracotta tiles. She could “feel” the sacred energy from the other side and yearned to climb over, to be in that courtyard of beauty and stillness with the nuns. The sense of a sacred space was a visceral experience.
She was raised Catholic and intrigued by the rituals of Sunday Mass. One day, during a catechism class at eight years of age, she began to ask Sister Mary questions that went unanswered — in fact, she was scolded. Her curiosity about the teachings of Jesus, and about how religious organizations taught them, fueled her desire to become a minister — perhaps a priestess.
At fourteen, her brother John introduced her to Buddhism, and she began the study of Nichiren Daishonin’s teaching and learned to chant nam-myoho-renge-kyo. She developed a strong daily practice of Faith–Practice–Study for many years, and was assigned a district leader position, hosting study-group meetings and group chanting sessions and offering faith-based guidance to members.
In 1999 Lucinda attended a Sunday spiritual community service in Santa Rosa led by Rev. Edward Viljoen, DD. Deeply moved by his words — and his humor — she bought The Science of Mind, the teachings of Ernest Holmes. Cringing at every “God” and “Jesus,” she pushed through the religious wounding she carried from a Catholic girlhood, and her rejection of organized religion, and finished the book.
Wanting to learn more, she pulled out the Santa Cruz County Yellow Pages — that is how long ago it was! — and found a small local church, then called the United Church of Religious Science, where she began taking classes. Class after class, she came to treasure its intellect, common sense, and inspiration, and just as much the kindred spirits and friends she met there. To this day she practices and teaches Affirmative Prayer as taught by Ernest Holmes. She then studied two more years at the Center for Spiritual Living, San Jose, under Rev. David Bruner.
Two years later she took the written test and passed the oral panel to become a licensed spiritual practitioner. A few years after that she studied under Rev. Deborah Johnson of Inner Light Ministries in Soquel, supporting the community as a faculty member for the Certified Practitioner courses. In 2007, yearning to learn more about interfaith ministry, she attended One Spirit Interfaith Seminary; following her ordination she completed the One Spirit Learning Alliance spiritual counseling program.
Today Lucinda enjoys an interspiritual practice, communing with Great Spirit through many hours of silence, meditation, walks in nature, music, art, and yoga.
A Personal Statement of Intention
While attending a Licensed Spiritual Practitioner’s retreat in 2000, at the Center for Conscious Living, Lucinda’s intention was revealed during a guided meditation. It became the impetus for every workshop she offers today — helping other practitioners, ministers, and business owners find their footing.
“To serve those who are in service.”
