"For ritual to regain its meaning for us, it needs to feel true to our individual lives. But how can we justify modernizing and customizing rites that are sanctified, in some cases by divine law and in other cases by decades or even centuries of tradition? Isn't the whole point of ritual that it should be 'time-less' and 'absolute'? Don't those stately ceremonies derive much of their power precisely from the fact of having been repeated so exactly and so unquestioningly for so long?

"While this is not a simple question, and different people will no doubt answer it differently (just as some people will want to stick more closely to traditional patterns in devising their own rituals), it's important to recognize that no human tradition is truly static. Even the most conservative of the world's religions have seen changes in the way their rituals are performed over time. It's now fairly rare to find ceremonies conducted exclusively in Latin or Hebrew; at one time, it was much more common. Just as a common language, spoken and understood by all, has become the norm in most houses of worship, so too are lay ministers and members of the congregation more involved in religious services than they once were. Although women are still not allowed to become priests in the Catholic Church (a particularly ironic fact when one considers the vaunted status of priestesses in ancient times), in many faiths, the 'gender gap' has closed to the point where women can perform all the religious duties of their male counterparts.

"Clearly, change is part of our tradition. And for a rite to be powerful, it must not only evoke a sense of continuity with the past, but it must also feel relevant to the present. Rituals are not, as theologian and cultural historian Tom Driver notes, only instruments of transformation; they are also 'themselves transformed by the process of which they are a part.'

"For women, who have historically been excluded from leading and often even from participating in rituals, the move to transform that tradition is even more liberating — and even more necessary. Consider what it means for a Jewish woman, long accustomed to not even being counted in the minyan (or quorum) needed for prayer, to be able to recite the mourner's kaddish led by a female rabbi.

"The longer we continue to do certain things because 'that's the way they've always been done,' the longer we reinforce the idea that there's something unquestionably right, something 'absolute' and 'timeless,' about excluding women from celebrating Mass in the Catholic Church or from being called up to read the Torah. The flip side of the power of rites, of course, is that they can wrap social inequality in a mantle of tradition. If we're excluded from the process of choosing the colors and weaving the threads, it should come as no surprise when we find ourselves feeling as though we're wearing clothes that were made for someone else.

"The invitation to create meaningful rites for ourselves, then, is a radical one. It is an invitation to move freely into our own spiritual lives, to take charge of marking the passages that we find significant, in the ways that we deem meaningful. As the stories in this book illustrate, the experience of doing this for the first time can be exhilarating indeed.

"And if something has been lost in our becoming a less tradition-bound culture, something equally valuable has also been gained: the freedom to take responsibility for the direction and meaning of our own lives. The task is to seize and shape this freedom — consciously, deliberately, and joyfully. As the narratives that follow show, rites of passage are one way of doing that.

"Every rite of passage is an act of becoming, an act of taking responsibility for the self we are choosing to become. A meaningful rite weds knowledge to action, intention to expression, doing to being. For women, this is a matter of bringing the drive of the Masculine to the heart of the Feminine. 'I am here,' a rite of passage says. 'I am present in my life.' "