The New Republic has an interesting profile of an evangelical priest who converted to Orthodox Christianity because of his disatisfaction with the frivolousness of evangelical ritual.  I couldn't help but notice a certain synchronicity at work.

When Wilbur Ellsworth ministered at First Baptist, a typical Sunday service--held inside the church's immense but unadorned white-walled, burgundy-carpeted sanctuary--went something like this: Wearing a suit and tie, Ellsworth would stand at a pulpit and preach. Aside from occasionally rising in prayer and joining the church choir and orchestra in some traditional Protestant hymns, the congregants would largely refrain from any activity during the one-hour-and-15-minute service--except for once a month, when they would receive communion.

The service Ellsworth now leads at Holy Transfiguration, by contrast, has an entirely different feel. Wearing his priestly vestments and standing inside the church's small sanctuary--which boasts yellow walls covered with hundreds of tiny iconic pictures of saints and Oriental rugs on the floor--Ellsworth conducts much of the service from behind the iconostasis (or icon wall) where he is out of view of the congregation. The congregants stand for most of the two-hour service, constantly prostrating and crossing themselves, and the only music is rhythmic Byzantine chanting. At the end of the service, they file up to the front of the sanctuary--as they do every Sunday--and take communion. It's easy to see how, for someone reared in an evangelical church, the Orthodox Church might seem like something not just from another culture, but another world.

And yet it is precisely that otherworldliness that is part of what is attracting a growing number of evangelicals to the Orthodox Church.

I myself must confess to a certain affinity for these sentiments.  I grew up in an ultra-progressive Reform temple whose services bored me to tears and, as I later discovered, bore a suspicious resemblance to those of mainstream Protestant churches.  I distinctly remember being fascinated by watching the mass performed at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris and harboring a guilty sense of envy for the mystic ritual and pageantry that was wholly lacking in the Judaism I knew.

It was not until I came to Israel and witnessed unadulterated traditional Judaism in action that I realized that this also existed in Judaism, if not more so, but had been diluted or abandoned over the course of three centuries of reform and reconfiguration.  As a writer, I was particularly struck by the sense that, in these small, utterly unadorned neighborhood synagogues, the pronouncement of words alone was sufficient to conjure up the other world.  The Judaism I had previously known was prosaic, lacerated, to large to be human and too reduced to invoke what Levinas called the trace of God.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess that I remain firmly secular and can make no claim to piety or purity myself.  I am more than prepared to entertain the notion that the intertwining of religion and state in Israel has gone so far that it is now to the detriment of both.  Nonetheless, no amount of aesthetic grandeur, guitar toting cantors, pipe organs and choral singers will ever convince me that the "otherworldliness" afforded by the ancient invocations can be replaced by the new, the modern and the desperately different.