There is no question that my own encounter with Russian Orthodoxy changed me. I was a zealous 19-year-old Baptist when I first entered a hushed Orthodox cathedral in the provincial city of Krasnodar in the southern part of Russia, and I heard the walls praying. It shocked me right out of my pious little socks.

Three months later, traveling in and out of Orthodox churches, I would never be the same Protestant I had been. I understood in a more tangible way than I could have imagined the significance of the "smells and bells" of worship, the careful attention to the worshipping body as well as the worshipping spirit, the sense that God didn't exist "in my heart," but also out there in a big, strange world that demanded to be perceived through my senses.

John Burgess, a professor of systematic theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, set out with a much greater sense of intention to follow the same path I stumbled on as a teenager. In Encounters with Orthodoxy, he takes up the question of what American Protestants can learn from the ancient traditions of Orthodoxy and if there is any hope for our own renewal through that encounter.

The problem that led to Burgess' unresolved journey was distress about his own Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Deeply divided over moral issues, the churches of his acquaintance seemed to have fallen into the twin pits of performance-oriented worship and obsession with political and social agendas. He felt the church had "lost its grounding in the fullness of the apostolic faith." After spending one intense year in Russian, as he recounts in this book, and going back many times since, Burgess is convinced that a deep encounter with Russian Orthodoxy can change American Protestants for the better. Orthodoxy has resources, disciplines, practices, and theological understandings that can re-shape our perception of the Christian faith and ourselves within it that might in turn give American Protestants a renewed vision for our own traditions.

But before I get into the details, I want to acknowledge some of the difficulties. First, Russia is a troubled place, and every time I see Vladimir Putin standing next to Patriarch Kiril of the Moscow Patriarchate, I am not particularly enthusiastic about the transformative possibilities of Orthodoxy. Instead I see a nationalistic church that has proven itself willing to capitulate to power for its own sake. I know that there is a very complicated history that marks this reality; I just don't find myself interested in signing up for tutoring. Second, the traditions safeguarded by Orthodoxy cannot be adapted in any easy way into Protestantism. They grow out of very particular circumstances and cultures, as do our own. This means that Protestants cannot expect to adopt Orthodoxy in any superficial way. The difficulty of actually being changed by an encounter with Orthodoxy and not merely borrowing things we like at random is real.

Burgess knows and understands both of these objections and raises many others. The complexity of his approach makes his book both satisfying and unresolved. In each section of the book, he examines a particular Orthodox practice or value: miracles, ritual, holiness, beauty, monasticism. In a dialectical approach, he tries to see that practice through Orthodox eyes, then he raises Protestant objections to it, and finally attempts some kind of resolution or way forward.

To my mind, Burgess's central critique of American Protestantism as seen through an encounter with Russian Orthodoxy is about worship. For the Orthodox, God in worship is immanent and transcendent. In worship, the believer has an encounter with God's grace that is not primarily emotional, but physical. This encounter comes through the elevated sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes of worship. The incense, the icons, the elements of the sacraments, the chanting and prayers, the bending and the swaying of the physical body all bring the human into contact with the raining-down grace of God. The elements of worship are not symbols of grace in the abstract; they are vehicles of grace very much in the present moment of worship. In Orthodox worship, time and space are transformed, and the worshipper enters this paradise and is shaped by it as he or she responds to it with her own body. In American Protestant worship, we are more likely to talk about worship than to do it, and when we do it, we tend to hold our own physical comfort and our secular notions of time as paramount. We don't expect worship to change us necessarily—we think of private practices of devotion as more useful to transformation—but to entertain us or to connect us with our human communities.

But it would be a misunderstanding of what the encounter between Orthodoxy and Protestantism required if we thought that worship was merely a matter of how we spend time on Sunday. Rather, the Orthodox offer a transformed understanding of matter—the stuff of life—as infused with spiritual meaning, power, and energy. This is what Orthodox are noting when they venerate relics, a practice that probably could not be stranger to American Protestants. They venerate the entrance of the holiness of God into the flesh of a human being. In Orthodoxy, holiness is not something that is done by a believer; it is something that God brings into the world and then invites us to see and to hear. At its worst, Orthodoxy can treat relics as superstitious objects that grant miracles. At its best, Orthodoxy sees a world literally transformed by God's grace. Church is an opportunity to see and hear anew, to train one's vision for this different kind of seeing: "As we receive transfigured life in the church, we also learn to recognize a transfigured world around us. All reality inside and outside the church is now seen in the light of God's kingdom. The sublime beauty of nature and art point to the divine, and the church's vision of transfigured reality makes its members sensitive to that beauty."

The other part of Orthodoxy that appeals to Burgess is the way that it takes seriously spiritual disciplines as essential to the life of every believer. Burgess now continues practices of fasting and praying that were unknown to him before he left for Russia. He treasures these new practices because they help him to recognize that following Christ isn't something he does with his mind alone, but also, maybe even primarily, with his body in the context of other bodies and the body of Christ. American Protestants are too quick to emphasize their own comfort and self-satisfaction. They do not want faith to shine a light on their weaknesses and make uncomfortable demands.

Burgess leaves many questions unanswered in his own journey as well as in what he might be asking of American Protestants. After struggling with whether he should convert to Orthodoxy and admitting that many of his Orthodox friends believe that his soul is threatened as he remains outside the One True Church, he decided that he is best situated within Orthodoxy as a Protestant pilgrim. The challenge, as he sees it, is for North American Protestants to find new ways of encountering God's holy, transformative presence. I hear that as important, and at the same time, I struggle to see any tangible ways of taking up Burgess' call. How would Protestant practices of worship change if a deep encounter with Orthodoxy took place? Could such an encounter really go deep enough to re-configure our notions of the configuration of the material and spiritual? I don't know, but I do know that my own encounter with Orthodoxy, like Burgess', was enough to create a sense of dissatisfaction with business as usual. This might be, as Burgess suggests, a particularly Protestant way of encountering Orthodoxy, but it could also lead us to soul-searching and meaningful change.

Amy Frykholm is the author of See Me Naked: Stories of Sexual Exile in American Christianity.

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