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.
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