A few days ago, journalist Terry Mattingly posted on his Substack page a column about the beginning of Lent. No, Orthodox Christians don’t have ashes on our forehead (though we may well think, “Dang, that’s cool, why didn’t we think of that?”). We begin with the Rite of Forgiveness, in which we get face-to-face with every member of our congregation and ask them to forgive us.
It’s intense. It’s also an ancient practice (mentioned in the story of St. Mary of Egypt, c. AD 500), and must have some connection with the Jewish practice of asking the forgiveness of friends and family on Yom Kippur. I wrote about it here.
Terry went on, in his column, to send people to my post, and to encourage people to follow my writing, in terms that were too generous. So I wanted to pay tribute, in return, to my friend.
We go way back, waaaaaay back. In the early 90s, we were part of a small group of writers who got together by means of that newfangled thing, e-mail—AOL in those days, which I accessed via a phone line over an external modem. The group included me and Terry, Rod Dreher, Eric Metaxas, and a few others. We called ourselves “the Pogos.”
Terry was a professor of Journalism, and had already been writing his syndicated column, “On Religion,” for a decade. But most significantly, Terry was a founder of Get Religion in 2004, a website that covered media stories that have a religion angle. Usually the press had missed or misunderstood that element (“The press doesn’t get religion”), but when they got it right, they were praised. In his new Substack column, Rational Sheep, Terry often considers the same theme, with expansive professional knowledge and a lot of lived experience. I encourage you to sign up.
Terry says I’m one of his closest friends, and I wanted to say something about why that friendship has endured all these years. It’s because Terry is so very good at friendship. He practices the kind of friendship that prevailed in earlier centuries, when brotherly and sisterly love for friends was treated as important and worthy of cultivation. (This was before we all got so proud of our independence and, correspondingly, got so lonely). Terry is a truly loyal friend, and after disagreement will simply assume that we’re going to make up, and then he makes it happen. He can even apologize when necessary—a lost art in our time.
When I was trying to figure out my calling as a writer, circa 1995, Terry would call and we would have a “career counseling” session. I ended up not taking the path he recommended for me (writing for women, about the world of home and family). After such a phone call, I’d tell my husband, “Terry Mattingly loves you and he has a wonderful plan for your life” (the line street evangelists used about Jesus). I might not be keen on the plan, but I knew for sure he loved me.
So here’s a toast (I’ll have champagne, while Terry has tea) to classic, long-lasting friendship, the kind Terry has cultivated with me and so many others. He’s good at it. He’s good at it because he genuinely loves people. We could all take notes.
