As Milwaukee Franciscan Sr. Jose Hobday moved about the country presenting her retreats, the only items in her traveling wardrobe were two dresses and a sewing kit.

Hobday, who was part Seneca and Iroquois, called upon her Native American roots and its storytelling tradition to live simply and teach about prayer and spirituality. Simple living is "about choosing time for people and ideas and self-growth rather than for maintenance and guarding and possessing and cleaning," she wrote in her book, Simple Living.

During the 1980s and '90s, Hobday was a faculty member at Matthew Fox's Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Names University in Oakland, Calif. I thought of this great lady a few weeks ago during a phone conversation with Rhett Engelking, a secular Franciscan. Hobday and Engelking are of different generations, but their hearts are beautifully connected by the call of simplicity. It remains an unbroken green thread within the Franciscan charism.

Next month, Engelking leaves Milwaukee and his position as a group therapist and leadership development coordinator at Rogers Memorial Hospital to be the program manager of the Franciscan Action Network's new Earth Corps project at the network's headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Earth Corps is designed for young adults ages 18 to 35 who feel called to work at the grass-roots level on environmental, immigration and poverty issues within their parish settings. The project promotes simple and just living at community and personal levels.

"The big thing we are hoping to do is to bring about a transformative experience for young adults," Engelking said. "They have all the information they need on all of these social and environmental justice issues, but they don't know what to do with it."

His training programs will emphasize St. Francis of Assisi's philosophy of simplicity and offer practical tools for change at the local level. The courses also will study Franciscan Sr. Ilia Delio and Franciscan Br. Keith Warner's book, Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth.

The experiential level of the program will have people "digging in the dirt together, learning to see everything as sacred, and cultivating our universal sense of belonging," Engelking said. "It will stress moving from the 'egonomics' of greed into a truly compassionate economics directed toward the well-being of the entire planet."

Engelking comes from a sustainability background. He is currently a member of Casa Maria House of Hospitality, a Catholic Worker community in Milwaukee where half a dozen members live simple lifestyles. They practice carpooling, keep a garden to feed the poor and minimize personal expenditures. Members of Casa Maria House also are involved in public advocacy and recently marched on Milwaukee's financial district to protest the existing ideology of corporate personhood, a privileged status allowing companies unlimited freedom.

"If corporations didn't have sway to do what they please to the environment, the BP oil spill wouldn't have happened," he said. "But if a couple of my buddies and I were to dump a barrel of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, we'd be arrested."

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Head of new Earth Corps program hopes to emphasize Franciscan spirituality