Congratulations are, as always, out of character. But the Registrar will extend a dry nod in the general direction of anyone who has recently received their Officially Ordained Asshole credential and is, at this moment, wondering what to actually do with it. The credential arrives handsomely. The instructions do not. This post is the instructions.
Rule one. The title is for invocation, not for prefix. "Ordained Asshole" is not a salutation. It is not a line on a business card, or at least not on the business card you show to anyone whose opinion of you is load-bearing. The proper use case is the email signature of a personal account; the moment in a group chat when someone needs to be reminded that you are, formally, the worst person present; the wedding toast in which a credentialed dig lands better than an uncredentialed one. The title should feel, when deployed, slightly excessive. That is the register in which it performs.
Rule two. Do not invoke the ordination in any interaction with institutions that take themselves seriously. This includes banks, employers during annual reviews, police officers during traffic stops, and the medical profession at any stage. The ordination confers social standing, not legal standing, and the two are frequently confused by the recently credentialed. The Registrar files a dozen correspondences a month from graduates who learned this distinction the hard way. She files them, and she laughs, and then she has lunch.
Rule three — and this one is a matter of some delicacy — concerns officiating. A distressing number of ordination holders assume that because the document is styled after ministerial credentials, it confers the right to solemnize a marriage. It does not. Real officiant status is a matter of state law and paperwork and, typically, a short online course from a body that is not us. Our ordination is ornamental. It ordains you into yourself. It does not ordain you into the couple at the altar. Caveat emptor — and, in this particular case, caveat officiant.
Which brings us to the letter.
Some months ago, an enthusiastic graduate — ordained at the Base tier, we note, with some affection — chose to officiate a friend's wedding using our certificate as his sole qualification. The wedding itself proceeded charmingly. The marriage license did not. The resulting cease-and-desist arrived at the Registrar's office not from the couple, who remain our supporters, but from the officiant's own cousin, who had been seated in the third row and is, by profession, an attorney. The cousin was thorough. The cousin used footnotes. The Registrar had the letter framed and hung it above her desk, where it functions as both a reminder and a recruitment tool.
We did not respond to the letter. We did not need to. We simply added Rule three to this advisory and moved on.
Rule four. When the ordination is used correctly — as ornament, as punctuation, as a knowing reference between parties who have both opted into the joke — it is one of the most elegant credentials a person can carry. The document is handsome. The Latin is serviceable. The social dividend is real. Use it at dinner parties. Use it on the refrigerator. Use it in the bio of accounts that are not attached to your mortgage.
The Base ordination remains the Registrar's default recommendation for the uninitiated. It is the cheapest way to learn the rules above — and the only one of them that isn't learned in retrospect.
The ordination ordains you into yourself. Nothing more. Which, in the Registrar's experience, is quite a lot.