A Word for Ash Wednesday from Susan Marie Smith

"The current North American cultural context includes anxious liturgists who stick with authorized rites from the book in order to be certain of orthodoxy on the one hand, and unchurched amateurs who generate rites in psychologists' offices and living rooms in order to be able to heal and reconcile [on the other hand]. It is critical that those of us whose lives are given over to the mediation of God's grace and salvation to the world enter into the messy middle of inculturating rites that are fully Christian, orthodox and orthoprax, and fully indigenized to the particular peoples whose hurts Christ would heal were he walking the earth. This task calls us to be daring and critical, careful and adventuresome, experimental and theological. Let us take up the challenge." [quoted from Susan Marie Smith, "The Scandal of Particularity Writ Small: Principles for Indigenizing Liturgy in Local Context." Anglican Theological Review 88 (Summer 2006): 375-396