Where was God at Lake Nyos?
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
March 7, 2004

	If, as our Universalist forebears have always maintained, God is so good and so loving that no one, not even the worst among us, is going to hell, how does such a loving God allow 1800 people in a village in the central African nation of Cameroon simply to die one night in 1986?
	The question resonates in the facts of this particular disaster, for indeed it seemed that some destructive spirit was at work.  The story was told in the September 2003 issue of Smithsonian magazine, brought to me with these insistent questions by Katelyn Doran.  Lake Nyos lies in the crater of an old volcano; the village alongside has two divisions, an upper village up on the side of the crater and a lower village by the lake shore.  At about 9 PM on the evening of August 21, 1986, a villager named Ephraim Che in the upper village heard a rumbling like a rockslide, and then saw a strange white mist rising from the lake.  Che went to bed feeling ill.
	The next morning, as Che went down the hill, he noticed the color of the lake water had turned to red.  He noticed that th lake’s outlet, a small waterfall, was dry.  And then he noticed something even more peculiar – adead silence.  There were n0 birds calling, no cattle lowing, no cicadas buzzing.
	He came upon a woman from the lower village, and she was beside herself with grief.  It appeared that her entire family except her had just suddenly died. They boh went to the body of her father and tried to rouse him, but without success.  Many more were lying nearby.  Even in death, the bodies were peculiar, for there were no flies buzzing around them; the flies had died too.
	All in all it appeared that about 1800 people and several hundred cattle had died.  Most were found right where they would be at around 9 PM the night before, suggesting they had died on the spot.  Bodies lay near cooking fires, clustered in doorways and in bed.  The cattle lay scattered in the field, having simply dropped where they stood.
	This brief description cannot convey the horror as it must have appeared to the survivors, on that August morning, to see that most of their loved ones had dropped dead in the ordinary course of their activities. But it is enough to challenge us and to challenge our Universalist notion of a God who is loving and good.  
	Now the question of how bad things happen when God is good has a technical name, theodicy.  It is one of the most challenging questions of any religious faith, and it appear in many guises throughout religious as well as secular literature.  Novels I read in college such as Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five were all about theodicy. One of the deepest and most profound attempt to deal with the theodicy question is right in the Bible, the book of Job.
	The theodicy question comes in many forms, as I said, and these days when people ask how a bad thing can happen if God is just or good, they are often talking about a bad thing which humans have done.  A good person is murdered, or someone’s daughter is killed by a drunk driver, or a suicide bomber flies and airplane into a building, or a cruel regime comes to power which oppresses or exterminates whole peoples.  In such cases, when a person or group or people have directly caused the harm,, we tend to speak and think in terms of evil.  And the theodicy question becomes, how can people do such evil things and how can God allow people to do such evil things?  This is a much more poignant question for us, by the way, than it is for the Calvinists, who assume all of humanity is inherently depraved, and so for a depraved humanity doing evil is the natural state of things.  For Universalists evil acts were a result of ignorance of the actor’s true interests, and the answer is confrontation, containment and protection but also education, understanding and rehabilitation.  This is why Universalists led the movements for prison reform and against capital punishment in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
	But in Lake Nyos, there does not seem to be any evil to confront, for there is no human agency on which we can cast blame.  There were no chemical plants in the area, no military installations or terrorist organizations who might be testing nerve gas, though this possibility was certainly discussed.  Though no one could be sure in the early days after the disaster just what had caused it, the strong indications were that it was some kind of natural process.  So the talk of evil, as we usually understand that term, is beside the point.
	Yet the possible involvement of God is not beside the point.  In fact, from one view of religion, the whole idea of God arose in response to seemingly inexplicable natural catastrophes of just this type.  You will often see this point of view satirized in cartoons, where there are native villagers and volcanoes erupting and witch-doctors saying something terribly funny.  Call this the divine puppeteer view of God.  We have this thing which is happening, and we don’t know why, so let’s postulate that there must be someone offstage pulling the strings to make these things happen.
	I’m not quite sure, but I suspect that mostly this puppeteer view of God is one which we attribute to other people, particularly people from very different cultures whom we don’t want to try to understand very well.  Last week I got a smattering of Hawaiian history from several sources, one of which was a present-day guidebook, and one of which was a series of travel essays written by Mark Twain from his visit to what was then called the Sandwich Islands in 1866.  I was particularly interested in how the Hawaiians switched from their pagan religion to Christianity. 
 	Before the first contact with Europeans, in 1778, the Hawaiians lived under a very cruel and strict set of rules called Kapu, or taboo, which were run by the priests of the gods.  The punishment for even minor infractions of these rules was death, unless the person could make it to a place of sanctuary.  The rules prescribed a separation of the sexes, and women were forbidden to eat meat or eat in the presence of men.   Among the gods recognized were Pele, the goddess of the volcanoes, and Lono, the god of peace and fertility.  
 	The greatest Hawaiian King was Kamehameha I, who united the islands by military conquest, forged an alliance with England, and beat back an invasion by the Russians.  As was traditional for an ali’i, or chieftain, he was allowed several wives.  A chieftain would choose his wives from rival political factions or groups to add to his power.  One of the first wives of Kamehameha I was queen Ka’ahumanu.  He loved her greatly, and for a time he shared power with her, but he did not have any children with her, and after a few years he took another wife ho gave him a son.  In 1819 Kamehameha died, and his son Liholiho was designated to succeed him.  Tradition holds that in the period after one king dies, there is a general amnesty from the taboos, and they can be broken at will, until the new king takes power and reestablishes the rules.  In this case, Queen Ka’ahumanu, along with the mother of the new King, convinced Liholiho that the old kapu system should be broken;  they prepared a feast for his accession to the throne, and then invited him to sit with them and share it.  All of the assembled guests gasped when Liholiho accepted their invitation.  Here was the King violating one of the strongest kapus of all.  Yet nothing happened.  Lightening did not strike the new king dead.  He had graphically demonstrated that the old gods had no power, he cut the invisible puppet strings.  In so doing, he paved the way for tearing down the temples to the old gods, which he ordered later that year.  The next year, the missionaries came, and the Hawaiians eagerly converted to Christianity.  
	At least, that’s what was being taught to young Samuel Clemens in Sunday School in the 1830's.  From the Hawaiian’s point of view, the story is much more complicated than that.
	We all want our gods to have power, and we are willing to put up with a lot to placate them, to get them to do what we want.  The story of Jonah comes to mind. A lot of folks know that Jonah ended up in the belly of a big fish, but sometimes people forget how he got there.  He got there because he had set sail as a passenger aboard a boat.  You see God had ordered him to go to Nineveh and prophesy, and Jonah didn’t want to do it, so he shipped aboard a boat going in the opposite direction.  A great storm came up.  The sailors on board all cried to their gods to stop the storm, but to no avail.  But then they noticed that one person on board was not crying, and the ship’s Captain demanded to know why Jonah wasn’t praying.  Jonah finally ‘fessed up that he knew it was on his account that God had made the tempest, because he was trying to avoid going to Nineveh.  He invited the sailors to throw him into the sea, and promised that the storm would calm down.  They did, and it did.  And that’s how Jonah ends up being swallowed by the big fish.
	The God of the Bible is a God of activity; he is always intervening in the natural order of things to get his ways.  We have inherited this view of God, a being of infinite power, and much of the Bible is devoted to proving the physical power of God.
	In our everyday political affairs, we tend to think that with power comes responsibility.  If I am walking beside Lake Quannapowitt and there is someone drowning in the water and there is a life ring right there and it is in my power to throw it to the drowning person and save her life, most of us would agree that I have some responsibility to throw it, and that would be particularly true if I had somehow been involved in the events which got her into the water in the first place.
	So we tend to think that if God has the power to prevent a mass death such as happened at Lake Nyos, he would have the responsibility to do so.  The fact is, of course, that it did happen.  This would mean two things: either God is indifferent at best or malevolent at worst to the fate of the Nyos villagers, or God doesn’t have the power to prevent the disaster.
	The first of these possibilities is found in many religious traditions.  In Hinduism, for example, the god Shiva is both creator and destroyer, and this points to the deep truth that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin.  In Zoroastrianism, there are two complete gods, one good and one evil, and both are continually fighting over the earth.  The worldview of some of our fundamentalist and Calvinist neighbors is similar to this: God and Satan are posited as beings with supernatural powers who are engaged in a titanic contest for the world.  Seen from this perspective, a disaster like Lake Nyos is simply a local skirmish in this larger war where the forces of destruction got the upper hand.
	The problem is that most of us don’t think in these terms anymore, especially since the age of enlightenment.  Thanks to Isaac Newton and Liebniz and Faraday and Priestly and Darwin and Einstein, we look at a natural disaster first to see what might have caused it and then go about trying to figure out what we as humans can do to keep it from happening again or to get other humans out of the danger zone.  In the case of Lake Nyos, the world sent scientists, not shamans, and the scientists conducted some tests and determined that the cause of the deaths was the sudden release of a massive amount of carbon dioxide which had been dissolved in the lower layers of the lake.  Normally lake water circulates and carbon dioxide is released harmlessly into the air, but in equatorial climates, lake water doesn’t circulate and the carbon dioxide, fed by sources in the volcano, simply build up for years until something like a landslide triggers a massive release.
	So there you have it; not a malevolent god or Satan, but a very normal gas, one which is usually very friendly and helpful in the life cycle.  We couldn’t do without carbon dioxide.  It takes the wastes from our own bodies and put it into the air, where it becomes the source of life for the plants.  We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, plants do just the reverse.  That’s how the system is set up, and most of the time it works just fine.
	When it doesn’t, as at Lake Nyos, the scientist is inclined to look at it as a problem to be solved.  We don’t sacrifice virgins to the lake gods, what we do is figure out some low-tech, affordable way to release the carbon dioxide from the lower depths so that this doesn’t happen again.  And they succeeded.  They put a pipe down in the lake and somehow convinced the carbon dioxide to erupt through the pipe harmlessly.
	Does all this prove that there is no God, or that God is malevolent or, worse yet, irrelevant?  Not necessarily.  You see, we didn’t really explore the other fork of our conclusion.  We said that the Nyos disaster proves either that God is indifferent or that she doesn’t have the power to prevent things like this. 
	Let’s look at this second possibility a moment.  Suppose God creates the world, including the rules by which the natural order maintains itself, the second law of thermodynamics and the law of inverse squares and so forth, and has made this natural order such that it will always operate on those rules.  Suppose that such a world is the only way a world can be made.  Suppose that for life to exist on the planet, there has to be seismic activity, plate techtonics and so forth which will from time to time produce eruptions in the earth’s mantle, volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, big and sudden shifts of earth, lava, water or gas which might wipe out a whole population center.   Might God say that she is sorry, but that’s the only way the rest of it will work? 
	William Sloane Coffin describes his struggle with theodicy when one of his sons committed suicide, which he did by driving his car into a river.  Coffin says that some people have told him it was God’s will, but he can’t accept that.  He thinks God was the first one to weep as the waters closed over the car. 
	Maybe God wants us to accept that disaster will happen, that life is inherently catastrophic.  Jon Kabat-Zinn, the Buddhist thinker, has a book called Full Catastrophe Living which is based on this notion.  Our lives are inherently risky; to live in this world is to embrace the possibility to losing everything in an instant.  As our reading this morning had it, another asteroid might simply wipe out all life as we know it.
	But back to God, for a moment.  The view of God which asserts that God does not have power to intervene in the natural world is called process theology, and we will be discussing it some more at the Adult Religious Education class tonight.  Charles Hartshorne, one of the leading lights of Process Theology, once wrote a book with the title, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes.  Yes, the traditional view, going back to Anselm and Aquinas, is that God has three fundamental characteristics: omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence.  God knows all, is all powerful, and all good.  Hartshorne says you don’t have to hang on to all three of those characteristics, and your god will fit better with your scientific beliefs if you don’t.  Process theology is the attempt to marry a view of things in which God is possible with complete acceptance of the natural world and the laws under which it operates, which will from time to time produce a disaster like Nyos.
	My colleague Margaret Keip put it well in these two paragraphs from the talk I made available a couple of weeks ago:
“Ever since human beings began to intuit causes and consequences, we've tried to make sense of life's suffering and violence. Over the millennia there have been numerous explanations offered for the existence of evil in the world, no one of which has managed to eclipse all the others. The old ideas of a god who controls and who punishes were convenient, because we could then ask: why didn't——or doesn't——God do something? But this doesn't satisfy for very long, because it leads to another quandary: either God can't fix it (and maybe your god can beat up my god, and I lose), or God can and won't (and who needs a devil to blame when you've got a god like that?) Traditional theism has tackled the problem by denying the ultimate reality of evil; "all things work together for good," though how we may not be able to see within the limits of our vision and time span. 
I find that latter answer a lot more comfortable than the one I believe to be true. Which is: that evil is real, and exists at our behest; and that the possibility of evil and the possibility of devastating accident are the immense risks of the freedom at the very heart of existence. As Charles Hartshorne concisely puts it, "with a lot of free beings interacting, things are going to happen that nobody intended, not even God." 

	So what would we say to the survivors of the disaster at Lake Nyos?  We’d say that we are sorry that this happened, that our hearts go out to them and our minds support the efforts of human scientists to do what can be done to prevent it from happening again. What would we say to ourselves?  We’d say that we continue to embrace life in all its complexities and suffering, that we continue dancing in the face of death, that we are evolving a concept of a God who dances along with us, who co-creates the next moment from this one but, like us, doesn’t actually know what that next moment will entail.  We continue our full catastrophe living.

Amen.