Second Sunday in Lent 2025

Leslie and I were living in St. Paul Minnesota as I attending seminary in 1980. It was May of that year that Mount St. Helens was in the news. A series of small earthquakes had begun in mid-March around the site. By April 3 the Governor of Montana had issued an executive order creating a “red zone” around the mountain, for it was an active volcano and it posed a danger of erupting. When evacuation orders were finally given, the owner and caretaker of the Mount St. Helens Lodge at Spirit Lake refused to leave his home. The owner was one Harry R. Truman, not to be confused with Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States. Truman, the last holdout on Mount St. Helens, was almost certainly the first to die when the mountain blew its top on May 18. The pyroclastic flow, meaning the extremely fast flow of volcanic materials, that overtook Truman’s lodge buried the site under 150 feet of volcanic debris. Poor old Harry refused to heed the warning, and he paid the ultimate price…