Last Sunday the congregation I serve celebrated Earth Day.  I concluded my sermon with a quote from a former member of our congregation, Emory Smith.  Emory and his wife Annette were responsible for developing Hilltop Arboretum, that wonderful sanctuary for native southern plants located on Highland Road south of LSU.   In his small book, Hilltop: My Story, Emory writes:

Although church membership has meant a great deal to me, I can get a greater uplift of spirit when I see the sun gild the tops of the oak tress with a crown of glory or watch a band of laughing children playing under those trees.  I know that it is a privilege to help my neighbor find calmness of mind and uplift of spirit by contributing to an environment that speaks of peace and joy.  So we have worked and planned to enhance the beauty of our bit of nature.  To me, planning this woodland has been more than a landscape job.  It has been an attempt to put into tangible form my philosophy of life. 

The faith that I have found cannot be expressed by any of the greeds recited in the churches.  I cannot join in any of them without great reservations.  A faith is better expressed by the life we share with other people than by formal words. 

If I were to try to write the creed by which I live, it would be something like this:

I believe int he natural world about me and its fitness as a home for the human family.  It is my responsibility to do all I canto preserve this world of nature, to prevent its destruction or defilement.

I believe int he people among whom I life.  All of them have faults, but so do I.  It is in the people about us that we find our strength and the joy of life’s fulfillment.

I believe in myself, that I can meet life’s problems with courage and strength and calmness.

I believe in the world of nature in all that it means: the trees and the flowers about me, the smallest division of the molecule and the most distant stars of the universe.  As long as I live, I wish to face that world with insistent curiosity, but also with reverence and wonder.  I wish to be a good custodian.  May the small part of nature under my control be the better because of the way I have used it. 

May Emory’s creed be our own.  The world will be a better place because of it!