SOUL FOOD:

When it comes to caring for this planet’s natural resources, 64-year-old Ann Egan, a Huntington Beach resident, will bluntly tell you she’s a late bloomer.

“Buy what you want; spend what you want; do what you want. It doesn’t make any difference,” Egan said she used to think.

The confession conveys humility and regret.

Egan realizes she can’t make up for lost time, but from here on out she’s committed to changing her ways. If she can nudge a few others out of their slumber, so much the better.

This year, she has chaired the “Celebrate Earth Day” event at Saints Simon and Jude Catholic Church. Its aim is to get more people to reduce their consumption, reuse what they have and recycle. Egan calls these the three Rs.

Earlier this year, a plethora of silly international stories told of the Vatican announcing a list of seven new official sins. “Recycle or go to Hell, warns Vatican,” read one characteristic headline.

On the list of new sins are environmental pollution, accumulating excessive wealth and contributing to the poverty of others — transgressions not altogether new.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral statement in 1991 titled “Renewing the Earth.” In it they wrote, “‘Care for the earth’ is not just an Earth Day slogan; it is a requirement of our faith. We are called to protect people and the planet, living our faith in relationship with all God’s creation.”

A copy of the statement is available from the Diocese of New Ulm, Minn., at www.dnu.org/service/ cathsocteach-environment.pdf.

Long before the bishops published this statement, St. Francis, 13th-century founder of the Franciscan order of monks and patron saint of ecology, was laying its foundation. A brochure titled “St. Francis and Eco-spirituality,” found at www.sbfranciscans.org, says, “The deepest foundation for reverencing creation is the understanding that every creature, including oneself, is a sacrament of the love of God that causes all things to be.”

St. Francis, the brochure explains, regarded “all animate and inanimate creatures as his brothers and sisters because it was simply true.” Over the century, St. Bonaventure and Blessed John Duns Scotus further shaped the mystical intuition of St. Francis into a theology of “the Sacramentality of Creation.”

Six centuries before them, St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Isaac the Syrian expressed similar ideas.

Maximus spoke of a “cosmic liturgy,” described by the Greek Orthodox Rev. Deacon John Chryssavgis, in his “A New Heaven and a New Earth,” as an “interdependence of all persons and all things.”

St. Isaac taught that a merciful heart burns “with love for all creation — for humans, birds, beasts and demons — for all God’s creatures.”

The essence of all these teachings is as old as Scripture. St. Paul in his letter to the Colossians wrote, “Through Christ, God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

Genesis 2:15 bequeathed to us the responsibility to cultivate and care for God’s creation until the end of time.

To neglect to do so is not a new sin; it’s a forgotten charge.

Egan’s deep-seated faith and her years as a biologist married to another biologist brought her to remember it.

She recognized her responsibility when three years ago she got involved with the Social Justice program at Saints Simon and Jude.

Until then, she says, she was like so many of us.

She figured the world and its rich resources would always be there no matter what.

Having a grandchild also provoked her new perspective. She recalls the first lines from a decades-old Grateful Dead song, “We Can Run.”

“We don’t own this place, though we act as if we did. It’s a loan from the children of our children’s kids,” she recites.

The song’s last stanza seems to prophesize global warming:

“Today I went walking in the amber wind; There’s a hole in the sky where the light pours in. I remembered the days when I wasn’t afraid of the sunshine. But now it beats down on the asphalt land. Like a hammering blow from God’s left hand. What little still grows cringes in the shade till the night time.”

In her pessimistic moments Egan fears we may have already pushed our avarice for the earth’s resources too far. She can feel overwhelmed by the number and complexity of environmental issues.

When she does, she takes comfort in the wisdom of Mother Teresa, who advised, “Just do what’s in front of you.”

Egan hopes “Celebrate Earth Day” exhibits, open in the church’s Colman Hall after each Saturday and Sunday Mass this weekend, will inspire others to do that, too.

The exhibits will offer a variety of eco-friendly ideas for adults and kids to reduce consumption, reuse what they have or recycle at home, at work or at school.

Reducing, Egan said, is hardest for us.

“We kid ourselves into thinking more is more [but] if we raise another generation of consumers we’ll condemn ourselves to live by our mistakes,” she said.

Some suggestions targeted at kids work equally well for adults: Save a quart of drinking water by shutting off the tap while you brush your teeth; decide what you want from the fridge before you open the door; spare trees by packing your lunch in a box instead of in a brown paper sack and by substituting cloth napkins for paper ones.

Pondering such small changes, Egan presents a conundrum.

What one person does doesn’t make a whole lot of difference, she concedes.

On the other hand, if every single person gets off the hook by saying, “Well, what I do doesn’t make a difference,” we will never, she says, get anywhere.

For Egan that’s no longer an option.

She has bought a Toyota Prius. She has exchanged plastic baggies for reusable containers.

“Plastic is forever,” she says. “It doesn’t biodegrade.”

She’s joined the grassroots miles-to-market movement, foregoing the supermarket’s cherries from Chile for locally grown produce from the Huntington Beach farmers’ markets, among other changes.

Her hope: a whole lot of people making a little bit of difference.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].