Seven years ago, I asked Deacon Vicki Black, former managing editor at Cowley, and as sweet-souled a person as you are likely to meet, whether she would be interested in helping me beef up the content of the Diocese of Washington’s web site by providing a daily meditation excerpted from the vast library of Christian spirituality that she seemed to carry around in her head.
She said, yes, and the Spirituality section of the old diocesan site was born. We moved Vicki’s handiwork onto Episcopal Café when it was launched in April of 2007, and she has been providing our readers with bits of insight, inspiration and Christian history ever since. In 2009, she gathered some of her work into a book, Speaking to the Soul: Daily Readings for the Christian Year. The book reflected her recent fascination with the lives of the saints whose feasts we celebrate each day.
The highest compliment an editor can pay a blogger is that he or she required no supervision, and that was true of Vicki. She did her work well, she did it on time; she was entirely self-sufficient.
A few weeks ago, Vicki told me that she thought it was time for her to move on—that she’d been in the excerpt business long enough, and that there were other demands on her time. Because I know how time-consuming the Café can be, and because I was so grateful for all she had done, all I could do was wish her well. She chose Pentecost as her final day, and her you can read her final excerpt and a typically modest farewell note on the Soul blog, which we are going to leave dormant for a week so Vicki’s audience has a chance to leave her a note, and so casual readers will know a change is coming.
Thanks for everything, Vicki. You were the Soul of the Café.
Jim Naughton