Eco Catholic

Energy Audits and Portfolio Management

For a number of years, when a congregation joined Michigan Interfaith Power & Light (MiIPL), we provided an energy assessment of their facility conducted by a professional. The congregation now had a baseline that indicated how well their facility was performing in its energy use compared to other buildings from a similar climate and similar use.

We would provide both the report and an evening of energy education to the congregational staff and members that shared where their “low-hanging fruit” lies.

MiIPL and other IPLs across the country have partnered with EPA’s ENERGY STAR® for Congregations program [www.energystar.gov/congregations] in making ENERGY STAR’s Workbook for Congregations available to members. There is a wonderful manual at the ENERGY STAR for Congregations website, Putting Energy Into Stewardship, that is invaluable for congregations who are committed to lowering their use of fossil fuel energy.

In a special Earth Day, 2000, edition of Time Magazine, I came across an article on the Rev. Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest serving Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. She, in partnership with Steve MacAusland, had founded Episcopal Power & Light. Episcopal Power & Light represented a coalition of Episcopal congregations that had purchased green power. Episcopal Power & Light soon became California Interfaith Power & Light with the participation in the collaborative of congregations from other Christian denominations and Jewish synagogues. The Interfaith Power and Light (IPL) movement has spread across the country where now 38 states and the District of Columbia have recognized IPLs.

Nearly 1,000 households in the rural community of Springfield, Kentucky, have become earth healers. And they want the world passing by their doorsteps to know what they’re up to.

So they’ve decorated their mailboxes with vibrantly colored decals announcing that “we are proud to be a Green Pioneer Home.”

Green Pioneers have pledged to incorporate eight simple, doable, sustainable living practices into their lives. The working list, which they sign onto, from a Web site, has 17 activities to choose from. People can recycle, use compact fluorescent bulbs and reusable shopping bags. They can grow some of their own food, use natural cleaning products, give their car a Sabbath day off once a week and stop buying bottled water. They can incorporate a prayer practice such as mindfulness, silent time, and meatless meals into their lives.

BREATHING UNDER WATER
SPIRITUALITY AND THE TWELVE STEPS
By Richard Rohr
Published by St. Anthony Messenger Press, $15.99

A quarter century ago, Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr gave a series of talks in Cincinnati that linked the wisdom of the Twelve Steps Program to what St. Francis called “the marrow of the gospel.” “I was amazed at how obvious and easy a task it was,” he said.

Now he’s updated those talks in his new book. Breathing Under Water.

He reflects about his earliest experiences with such programs, when "the people dealing with their addictions in the church basement thought they had left the church for the Wednesay night meetings in the basement, while many upstairs in the sanctuary presumed that their ‘higher’ concerns were something different from ‘those people with problems’ down below."

The reality, he says, was that we were dealing with a common inspiration from the Holy Spirit and from the collective unconscious of the human race.

As a kid raised in a large family with what he calls “healthy neglect,” the late Passionist Fr. Thomas Berry roamed the woods and fields around his home in Greensboro, N.C. At the age of 11, he said, his sense of “the natural world in its numinous presence” came to him when he discovered a new meadow on the edge of town.

“The field was covered with white lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my thinking at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember.”

It was not only the lilies, he said. “It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in the clear sky. … This early experience has remained with me ever since as the basic determinant of my sense of reality and values. Whatever fosters this meadow is good. What does harm to this meadow is not good.”

By extension, he said, “a good economic, or political, or educational system is one that would preserve that meadow and a good religion would reveal the deeper experience of that meadow and how it came into being.”