I want to send out Happy Easter wishes to all our readers who are Eastern Orthodox believers and celebrate Easter today. Also, I thank you for the beauty of your services: Tonight I attended the Orthros and Pascha Service at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and it was breathtaking. The music was starkly beautiful; like the words of the liturgy (which were about 85 percent Greek, but which I was able to follow with a facing-page translation in the service book), it created a sense of the numinous, a sense of holiness in the original meaning of “something set apart from the ordinary.”

When it comes to Western liturgies, be they Protestant or Catholic, I have the handicap of being a “connoisseur”: Everything I see or hear in a Baptist or Catholic or Episcopalian liturgy, I end up comparing with the other thousands of instances of the same thing I have already seen or heard, whether it’s settings of the Kyrie, sermons on specific Bible passages, or choirs and hymns. Perhaps if I were Eastern Orthodox, I would bring this same (in my view, disordered and unfortunate) sensibility to that faith as well? But to a relative newcomer (I’ve been to only a handful of Orthodox services over the years), the Eastern liturgy is quite hypnotic in the way it takes the worshiper out of himself, by impressing him with its atmosphere of ancient seriousness. (Though I should make clear, especially because this was an Easter service, that the people I encountered before, during, and after the liturgy were far from somber; and I regret I couldn’t join them for the post-service dinner, which was getting under way when I left, at 2:20 a.m.)

Allow me to leave the final word on this general subject of Orthodox liturgy to a believer, our old friend, Rod Dreher, who has been doing blog posts for Holy Week:

It’s holiness. Everything about Orthodox worship points to the majesty and sanctity of God, and the intense drama of participating in His life. I heard myself reading some of those lines in the Psalms and thought, oddly: if you really believe these words, you can’t live an ordinary life. I mean by that that life is not mundane. The world truly is enchanted. It’s not just in the Psalms, but in the beauty of Orthodox worship, and its chants, its rhythms, its pageantry, even in a country mission like ours, which is tiny and poor. The length of the services teaches you something too, though you might not realize it till later. It saturates you in the experience of sanctity, makes it present and visceral. I think it’s this way all the time, but never more intensely than during Holy Week. It is a rich, rich ground in which to grow in steadfast faith and the joy of wonder.

N.B. To anyone who’s interested in Eastern Orthodoxy, I recommend the Internet radio station Ancient Faith Radio. It has one channel for talk, and another for music.