Where the rest of the world sees misery, Charlotte Eulette sees opportunity.

Divorce? Layoffs? Cancer diagnosis? All in her domain.

Eulette is at the forefront of a growing movement of "celebrants" who preside not only at the usual weddings and baby namings, but who also mark experiences not typically commemorated: suicides, stillbirths, homelessness. In each case, celebrants acknowledge pain and grief while urging survivors on to new beginnings.

"Every milestone needs to be honored, even if it's an uncomfortable milestone," says Eulette, of Montclair. "People in our culture tend to be mute about the devastating moments, but those are often the most transforming ones. Not everything in life is a Hallmark card." Celebrants' ceremonies are a blend of rites and symbols borrowed from established religions, though the end result is non-sectarian. Skeptics might dismiss the whole thing as New Age hoo-ha, but endorsers say the rituals frankly acknowledge the underside of life, even though they often sound a lot like the average wedding, complete with scripted vows, responsive readings and familiar refrains. Consider the downsizing ceremony for Christoff Grieder, an Essex County music therapist laid off months earlier from St. Barnabas Medical Center when the Livingston hospital closed part of its psychiatric unit. "Do you feel like a person who has recovered from a crisis?" Eulette asks. "I do," says Grieder, surrounded by his wife and kids, his former boss, past colleagues and friends. "Do you honor the sense of loss and gain in the process of recovery?" "I do." "Do you accept this experience and want to remember it and learn from it as a conscious part of your life?" "I do." As the ceremony ends, Eulette says: "I now declare you a person possessing strength, wisdom and resilience in the time of crisis." Such ceremonies were unheard-of in the United States until 2001, when Eulette imported the idea from Australia, where celebrants have been handling funerals and weddings for 30 years. Back then, Eulette was recently divorced and out of work as an advertising executive. When a well-traveled, philanthropic friend proposed this new line of work and agreed to sponsor a celebrant foundation, Eulette was game, though unsure the concept would catch on. Then the World Trade Center collapsed, and the phones at Celebrant USA started ringing. Eulette organized "hope ceremonies" for families whose loved ones were missing, and funerals once they were found. Typical to quirky For $600 average per event, Eulette and other celebrants handle a range of ceremonies, from the predictable (weddings and same-sex unions, funerals, adoptions) to the indisputably quirky: housewarming and house-leaving services, pet memorials and safe-haven rituals for homeless or battered women. They organize end-of-life tributes for terminally ill people, in which friends and families pay homage to the dying person, and the person, in turn, pays homage to them. Today, there are about 450 celebrants across the country, nearly all of them women. All are graduates of Eulette's non-profit Celebrant USA Institute, which for $1,500 offers an eight-month course in comparative religion, ritual symbolism, philosophy and psychology, traipsing from Carl Jung to Margaret Mead, from hints on interviewing clients to tips on writing individualized ceremonies. In the New Jersey area alone, Eulette said, her graduates performed nearly 1,000 ceremonies in the last year. Another 65 celebrants are expected to graduate in June, some of them leaving behind jobs as social workers, teachers, actors and geologists.

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