Cherishing The Moments That Are Absorbed By What Is Real

I just finished watching Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog. It's a profound documentary about Timothy Treadwell, a man who's desire to make peace with his own soul and find a place to belong led him to live with grizzly bears in Alaska for 13 summers. Why did he stop at the unlucky number 13? He didn't really have a choice. He definitely would have spent more summers there, but at the end of the 13th, one of the bears ate him.

What makes this film brilliant and so beautifully haunting is the honesty humanity with which it deals with such a difficult protagonist. Herzog does not begin to attempt to make Treadwell a black and white hero. The film shows his life to be a messy one. Treadwell ended up going insane, and Herzog does not try to pretty this up. Neither does he exploit it by turning him into a two dimensional crazy person for comic effect or added eerieness. Herzog doesn't even romanticize Treadwell's love for nature. Where in nature Treadwell claimed to have found love, perfection and oneness, Herzog, in a voice over of a close-up of a grizzly's face, confesses to seeing only "the overwhelming indifference of nature." (Which seems to be the interpretation supported by at least one of the bears whom Treadwell served for 13 summers.) What Herzog does is show a man going to extremes to try and find something worth living for.

Treadwell found it increasingly difficult to see anything real in another human. He could not find intimacy and belonging in the human world. His way of dealing with this was to sink into madness, and create in his mind a oneness with the grizzlies and their habitat that was not there.

Herzog does not demean Treadwell for this. He treats his search as what it is, tragic, beautiful, human, something we can all relate to and learn from, and, most important for Herzog, honest (though his solution was not - thus the tragic part). For Herzog the world is not unified in God, or love, or harmony, but chaos and violence, and he sympathizes with any person who looks honestly at this chaos and retreats into insanity.

Though I obviously do not share Herzog's worldview (I respect it as the most truthful one that does not know God) I was deeply touched by his film. It plunges deep into a troubled soul and offers no simplistic, cardboard answers, yet still left me with a deeper appreciation for life. I can relate to a world whose search for truth in others results only in consternation because it no longer knows how to look for or recognize the Imago Dei in another. I've been there. Truthfully, some of me still is (as long as we fight, parts of all of us are).

This film made me especially grateful for my fiancee. For the fact that I, unlike Treadwell, have someone with whom to share and live out the real, the self-sacrificing love and faithfulness of Jesus Christ. It made me appreciate the oneness that God is creating in us. It made me want to call and leave ridiculous messages on her voice mail so she can laugh at my expense. It made me cherish the moments we share that seem incredibly real. Like last summer when we sat together on the sofa and I held her in my arms and looked at the clock then closed my eyes and stuck my nose in her hair and just tried to really live in the last eight minutes we had left to celebrate our third anniversary. Those eight minutes are still real. Or the times we argue without the fear that our disagreements will lead to separation. Or the time I bore my soul to her and shared my deepest secret. It was a brutal moment. But it was honest, vulnerable, safe, and godly. It was not a happy moment. It was a real one.

Why is it that people like Treadwell are unable to find the oneness they seek in other people? It is not that people like my fiancee and I are better or know how to see what is real because of our own merit, but because what is real has found us. I hope more people like Timothy Treadwell are not left to escape into madness, but see that they too can be found by what is real.