Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy.

Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy, by Frederica Mathewes-Green HarperSanFrancisco, 245 pp., $20)

Frederica Mathewes-Green was a highly reluctant convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, "dragged kicking and screaming" by her husband, an Episcopal priest who had come to feel that his own church was bearing false witness. He eventually accepted re-ordination and started a small mission church in Catonsville, Maryland, under the dispensation of the Antiochian Orthodox Church. This "pilgrim's journey" is his wife's account of a year in the life of their parish, and of how "What was strange and perplexing has become my sweetest home." She tells about icons; the seamless quality of the Divine Liturgy, in which everything is sung; the strictness of the Orthodox disciplines of fasting. This reader cannot help wondering whether the Mathewes-Greens would so quickly have come to feel at home if, instead of founding a small church composed almost entirely of recent converts, with the priest learning right along with his flock (a mixture of American do-it-yourselfery and, yes, something reminiscent of the Early Church), they had joined a big-city parish of Eastern Mediterranean ethnicity. And one should point out that an emphasis on "grateful repentance"--constantly remembering our sinfulness, not in a puritan way but offering our weakness to God--is by no means unique to Eastern Christianity. Still and all, Facing East can be read with enjoyment, and much of it with joy, by Western Christians who have no intention of going East. Through the details of this book, one can often see, as through an icon, our Lord Himself.