Book Review: Caring Liturgies: The Pastoral Power of Christian Ritual

Abstract

Caring Liturgies: The Pastoral Power of Christian Ritual. By Susan Marie Smith. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2012. viii + 152 pp. $18.00 (paper).How does one bring theological and liturgical resources of church into situations of transition, celebration, and loss that are not clearly described in official denominational worship resources? This is question that Susan Marie Smith addresses in Caring Liturgies: The Pastoral Power of Christian Ritual. Smith offers principles drawn from fields of ritual studies and liturgical theology that will give lay people and clergy confidence to create of transition and healing that may be one-time events particular to a person, a congregation, or a situation (p. 2).Smith begins by observing that ritual has often been construed as compulsive or manipulative at worst and arid at best. This ritual myopia has led to lost opportunities for pastoral care due to a lack of confidence and imagination on part of lay and clergy leadership. Smith urges readers to practice ritual resourcefulness, but only with ritual competence, which requires the ability to know when and how to ask for, plan, lead, or support rituals that mediate healing, transition, and life (p. 17).As a counterpoint to common misunderstandings of ritual, Smith argues that ritual can be creative and generative, and that church needs to reclaim its role in encouraging new rites for specific occasions that are essential to process of conversion in faith and growth in (p. 14). Caring Liturgies draws upon scholarship within discipline of ritual studies, particularly using work of Catherine Bell and Ronald Grimes, to describe how to create rites that speak to situations in which an appropriate liturgical response is unclear. The book progresses from and describing nature of a creative rite (chapter 1), to suggesting who should take part in shaping and executing them (chapter 2). Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe how to create actual rites, and chapter 6 concludes with bigger picture of why creative rites are important, grounding them in paschal mystery of Christ as the lens through which to look at focal persons life (p. 124).A particularly helpful insight is Smiths proposal that creative rites be shaped around one central, defining (p. 74). Smith employs a Ricoeurean understanding of metaphor and symbol to make distinction that metaphors are a product of language, while symbols are expressed through things, people, and actions (p. …