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‘Light up the Night’ is new program at St. Bridget’s

By Paul Amrhein
Special to The Catholic Virginian

As winter settles in and the days are short we are more aware of the need to dispel the darkness and light up the night.

As we moved through Advent and into the Christmas season we at St. Bridget Church in Richmond have been taking on the issue of global climate change through a campaign called “Light Up the Night,” an idea that developed from the Human Concerns Committee.

While the committee members realized the differences of opinion among folks in the parish about climate change, our feeling was that as Christians we need to further our understanding of stewardship so that it includes God’s creation. We also need to overcome the paralysis that can happen when people disagree on an issue.

So the thought developed that we could design an educational program along with selling compact fluorescent light bulbs.

We ran a series of bulletin announcements taken from the U.S. bishops’ statement “Global Climate Change: A Plea for Dialogue, Prudence, and the Common Good” that was released in November 2001. Unfortunately, it did not get much circulation due to other events of the time.

We also developed an attractive brochure explaining the campaign along with scriptural references and information from the Global Climate Change Statement of the bishops.

The brochure also provided folks with a table showing a cost comparison between incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs), showing how the CFLs paid for themselves in short order. CFL bulbs are much more energy efficient and last longer, but the up front cost is greater.

Our challenge was to ask each family to replace one light bulb. This would lead to the parish community saving 824 tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.

We also offered a session called “A Faith Response to Climate Change” in which folks could learn about climate change and find out what they could do about it.

Wherever they found themselves on the subject, they could come and talk about it in a safe place.

We showed “Kilowatt Ours” during the session which helped people recognize what they could do to save energy.

If we look at the healing Jesus performed in the gospels it was not just physical, it led to restoring the bonds of relationship. 

We are called to do the same, not just among humans, but with God’s creation. That is the essence of the prophets’ and Jesus’ call to justice.

God’s creation is a complex web of relationships. When we upset those relationships, God’s creation suffers.

As Christians we are called to make sacrifices pleasing to God. We may have to make some sacrifices in our stewardship of God’s creation, but buying compact fluorescents is not one of them. Despite the larger initial investment in price over traditional bulbs, they pay for themselves and in the long run are much cheaper to use in terms of lower electric bills.

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