Eulogy for the Crocodile Hunter
Essay Posted September 5, 2006 by James E. Nelson
According to the internet, Steve Irwin had died. A stingray stinger punctured his chest and entered his heart. Experts in the field say it was a freak accident that happens very rarely. The story was just a bit too bizarre and too bizarrely fitting an end for a man like Steve Irwin, so I did a web search and checked several reputable news sources. It is evidently true. All one can say is, “Crikey!”
First, even though Lyn (his mum), Terri (his wife), and their two children have no clue who I am, they have been a part of my cable television life for many years, and I offer my condolences to them. The Irwins had a down home friendliness that simply made them a part of the family. They had a disarming honesty that made them totally real in spite of the television screen separating their story from our living room.
Stories of Steve Irwin’s death have been a regular part of internet lore. Urbanlegends.com has quite an extensive section on the various reports of his death (and at the time of this writing, still has him listed as NOT dead. They will no doubt catch up.) Crocodilehunter.com is down, no doubt it has been buried under a load of web site hits and traffic that it simply could not handle.
I never saw any indication whatsoever that the Irwins were Christian or even vaguely religious. In spite of that they exhibited (in their television persona anyway) a goodness that reflected the image of God that still remains in humans, even though it has been marred and hidden by millennia of sin. Both Steve and Terri were interested in life and completely fascinated by all that life had to offer. Steve, in particular, approached life with a child-like wonder that I found completely infectious. Even when he was talking about something I thought I could care less about, I found myself drawn into his excitement. By the end of the show I invariably found myself enthralled in a brand new way with God’s creation.
And that is a gift of God, no matter its source, because it is a revealing of God’s wonder, and in turn, my wonder of and in God, of God’s creation, which God made in a wonderful and mysterious way. That is divine grace in its most natural and physical form.
But there was another facet to Steve Irwin. He not only exuded wonder; he exuded a certain weirdness. I suppose it is the union of the child and the man, the adolescent and the adult, the fool and the student who was wise in the ways of nature. He was so comfortable in the world of nature that he never quite fit in the world of humans. He was an Alyosha (the youngest of the Brother’s Karamozov), except, rather than a fool for Christ, he was a fool for Christ’s creation. By stripping away our human pretensions, he revealed a new and unusual dimension of nature previously hidden by our propriety.
There were other environmentalists who were simply weird (or, at the very least, mostly weird). Timothy Treadwell was simply weird. He lived with grizzly bears; he thought they were his friends, and was eventually killed by one near Denali National Park in Alaska. And that sort of weirdness grows out of arrogance. Treadwell (and those like him) thought they understood nature, but it was actually a bloated and misguided sense of self that they were enthralled with. They turned themselves into little gods of nature who thought they could dictate to the rest of us how we ought to relate to nature.
Irwin was the mirror opposite of this. He exuded a deep humility and respect for nature that allowed him to interact with it in outrageously foolish ways that were, at the same time, carefully calculated to reveal nature in all its glory. In the midst of this, Irwin remained on the sidelines as nature’s little clown. He was reminiscent of John, who said, “I must decrease while you increase.” Irwin understood his place and his role and never (or very rarely) himself became the object of interest. He always offered nature itself as the truly fascinating subject.
Creation has lost one of its great promoters with the death of Steve Irwin. At some mysterious level, I wonder if the crocodiles realize this and mourn the loss.
Copyright © 2006 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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