Not all hurts will be resolved this side of eternity
During my decade living in Seattle, I became enthralled with the story of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Saint Helens, which happened 40 years ago Monday.
I visited there multiple times; I hiked in the desolate blast zone and climbed to the rim of the crater. I’ve read up on the history of the place, wanting to soak up every last detail. I’ve meticulously studied maps of the region as it was before 1980, comparing them with the vastly-altered topography of today. I’ve examined pictures of the infamous volcano while it was still intact and looked like America’s Mount Fuji, comparing them to images of its drastically diminished profile now.
Why? For one thing, I’ve always been fascinated by places that used to exist but no longer do, particularly those I never had a chance to see. I try to envision exactly what the place looked like before its demise, and if I had a time machine, I’d give anything to go back and visit it in person. Since that isn’t possible, it’s like a personal interest that will never be exhausted or quenched.
Second, I’m instinctively drawn to settings or locations where the spiritual clearly intersects — almost collides — with the physical. At the risk of revealing my heresy, this is far more interesting and relevant to me than a collection of ancient documents written by fallible, finite human beings who lived in times, places, and cultures that bear little resemblance to my own.
Or maybe a much better way of putting it is this: The written words of Scripture are complemented by the physical realm, and vice versa, and without either one, I think we’d be at a loss for even beginning to understand the vast, limitless, deeply mysterious universe and our place and destiny in it. But with the aid of both, I think we can at least begin to make sense of the contours of an existence that is otherwise often mind-boggling.
There are two stories relating to Mount Saint Helens that I find particularly remarkable. One is the story of Harry Truman, the curmudgeonly, eccentric, whiskey-and-coke-swigging octogenarian who shared a name with the 33rd president and lived alone with 16 cats at a lodge at Spirit Lake, the picture-perfect body of water that sat ringed by old-growth forests just north of the volcano prior to its explosion. When the peak first started to rumble forebodingly in the early spring of 1980 after over a century of quiet, he refused to evacuate and earned himself something of a cult following before he was killed instantly on the fateful morning of May 18 of that year.
By all accounts, even if he had evacuated while there was still time, he would have died anyway when he saw what the mountain did to his beloved lodge and lake.
The other story is that of David Johnston, a young volcanologist who was ironically among the only experts to correctly predict almost precisely what would eventually happen as an ominous bulge began to form rapidly on the north face of the volcano that spring. Magma was building up beneath the surface, and an earthquake would eventually cause the bulge to fail and release pressurized, superheated gas and rock with biblical force. As Johnston put it in the weeks leading up to the climactic eruption, the mountain was a “dynamite keg and the fuse is lit.”
The day before the eruption, at the last minute, Johnston agreed to fill in for another scientist who was supposed to sit at an observation post north of the mountain but had to be elsewhere the next day. It was a seemingly innocuous, forgettable choice that ended up costing him his life.
At 8:32 the next morning, he frantically radioed the USGS headquarters in Vancouver, Washington, with last words that would become immortalized. Today, the ridge where he was standing as he helplessly watched the mountain blow up bears his name in memoriam.
At first look, all of this sounds like a pointless tragedy. One thing, of course, was the loss of a priceless natural setting with sublime beauty, built over millennia only to be violently destroyed in mere seconds and made to look more like a moonscape than a tranquil outdoor paradise in the Pacific Northwest. At its center was a lonely old man whose remaining solace was the majestic albeit isolated place he had called home for decades — a place that will never again look the same, even in my lifetime or the lifetimes of any of the children of my generation.
As if to add insult to injury, the life of a brilliant young scientist was extinguished long before his time. What if he had lived to tell the story of Mount Saint Helens? What if he had been given the opportunity to build upon the near-prophetic predictions he had made that spring and apply them to his future work studying volcanoes? How might modern science have benefited from his insights in ways that it hasn’t because he was lost too soon? Who might he have taught, and whose lives might he have saved?
And all because of what he thought was an inconsequential choice made solely to help out one of his colleagues.
It’s a story heard all too often in life — something tragic happening, or not happening, all because of an ostensibly random chain of events that conspired to lead to an outcome that could have been completely different if even one apparently negligible factor had not been at play.
Minutes before the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, one person after breakfast arbitrarily decides to go back to their hotel room first, while another goes directly to the conference they’re attending at the top of that tower. One person lives; the other dies. If their choices had been the opposite on that morning, so, too, would have been their fates — and the fates of countless others whose lives they each touched.
A gunman in a school shooting walks into one classroom instead of another right next to it. No one will ever know why. But the children in one room perished, and the ones in the other survived.
At Nazi death camps during World War II, countless souls were sent to the gas chamber, while others in the exact same position at that moment in time went on to live long and ultimately rewarding lives, seemingly entirely because of the whims of sadistic guards who took it upon themselves to play God by casually and callously choosing the fates of their fellow human beings.
Tragic. Senseless. Inexplicable. By any logical account, meaningless. Such is the apparent nature of life. We hear it over and over again, both in the news and sometimes as a matter of our own circumstances.
But if you study the story of Mount Saint Helens, you’ll realize that the picture is not nearly so simple. As Seattle columnist Knute Berger notes, even the cataclysmic blast of the 1980 eruption failed to extinguish all life in its path, despite all appearances to the contrary: “Pocket gophers survived the blast in their underground tunnels. They eventually dug out through the ash, and their little dirt mounds helped other plants get established.” Within a matter of years, larger animals were seen roaming the area again.
And as for the destroyed Spirit Lake, which was choked with toxic volcanic gases and littered with the skeletons of decimated trees, an article in American Scientist magazine notes that: “Over the years following the eruption, limnologists would note that life not only returned to Spirit Lake, but that it became more abundant than it had ever been. The lake would eventually be reborn, but its ecology would be vastly changed from what it was before the blast.”
“…Life not only returned to Spirit Lake, but…it became more abundant than it had ever been.”
Something new, and something ultimately even better than what was before. An outcome that never could have been fathomed given the gravity of the tragedy that gave birth to it.
If you hike in the blast zone today, you’ll witness an absolutely incredible display of the seamless coexistence of death and new life. Splintered tree trunks lie motionless either on the ground or standing up straight like embedded toothpicks, frozen in time, just feet away from fragile wildflowers that blossom atop the once-scorched ridges. Fledgling trees grow slowly but surely, replacing their ancestors who perished en masse in a matter of seconds as if struck down by an otherworldly force. If you look closely, you’ll notice a waterfall rushing down from a new glacier that formed inside the crater after the eruption; that water is presumably making its way to the watershed that supports the new life in this region.
One of my favorite pictures from hiking in this area happens to be one that seems to encapsulate the spiritual significance of the place without a single written or spoken word. It is a lone tree that sprang up at some point after the eruption, and today it stands defiantly in the face of the volcano that wiped out its predecessors, as if life itself is giving a middle finger to death.
There are so many lessons to be learned from this tiny corner of the globe that spewed ash all the way around it 40 years ago. One is the inherent connectivity of all things in a universe where we often mistakenly try to view people, places, events, and entities in isolation from each other.
The pocket gophers that survived the blast and unwittingly paved the way for other forms of new life are a testament to this. So is the volcano itself, whose snow and ice gives nourishment to the very terrain it once devastated, and whose violence paradoxically gave unprecedented rebirth to a lake once thought to be permanently dead. The lion gave new life to the lamb, so to speak.
The story of that lake, by the way, echoes the words of an often-recited piece of Scripture in Isaiah: “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
Mount Saint Helens is a case study on what I would call a liminal space — a dimension that holds in tension the “already” and the “not yet.” This is symbolic of experiences that everyone will eventually have in life, probably multiple times. I certainly have. An earlier chapter is over, and the elements of that chapter are gone, but they somehow pave the way for something bigger and better that is yet to be seen or realized, even if there are subtle hints of it right in front of your face. Mourning and hope stand side by side here.
Christ was crucified on Friday. He rose from the dead on Sunday. Saturday was the liminal space. Arguably, Saturday is the space we all live in now — there are occasional signs of hope, but they regularly seem eclipsed by the gravity of the brokenness we all face, and no one has any certain understanding of what any of it means or what good, if any, can possibly come of it.
There’s a term I was introduced to by one of my professors when I was studying at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology: eucatastrophe, which literally means “good catastrophe.” He described it as referring to the thing that seems certain to spell permanent death or destruction actually turning out to be the very thing that fosters salvation and new life.
Certainly the crucifixion of Christ is an example of eucatastrophe; so, too, might be any number of other seemingly senseless tragedies that befall us individually or collectively. The brutal part of this concept is that resolution is yet to come, because eucatastrophe and liminal spaces are inherently intertwined. We cannot see the beauty of a journey fully realized without first walking through the dark valley that is an integral part of it. It’s painful and hard, but we have to accept it.
I will never get to see the pre-eruption Mount Saint Helens; it was before my time. Nor in our lifetimes will Harry Truman’s Spirit Lake ever again look as it once did. David Johnston will never see his potential as a scientist fully realized. There are people from all different walks of life who have faced unspeakable and seemingly inexplicable traumas that they simply have to live with. The scarred earth itself reflects that existential reality.
There are certain wounds that will not be fully healed or resolved this side of eternity. We have to learn to be okay with that, because, as Mount Saint Helens itself teaches us, a much greater story is still being written that transcends the mortal, ephemeral realm to which we are currently confined. We can see hints of it around us, if we take the time to look.
