Sunday, September 10, 2006
Tom Hanks, Fritz the Lion and the Existence of God
I have also recently acquired a mascot. It is a stuffed little lion called Fritz (friends of mine insisted that we have a naming ceremony). Fritz even got his own e-mail account (you can write him under fritzthelion@googlemail.com): I figured better for him to get all the junkmail than for me. 
Since he is attached to my backpack Fritz gets to travel places hardly anybody else goes to, and shares more situations with me than most of my friends. And at times you feel like talking to him, because it seems that he understands what you just went through: he was there, the others were not!
In that sense I understand Tom Hanks’ reaction, since he lost the one thing which went through the previous ordeal with him, which reminded him of it, and which in a strange way “understood him”. Now some people, philosophers and laypeople alike, will argue that God is for some believers what the volleyball was to Nolan or Fritz to me: a simple projection of human desire to be understood onto a fictitious being. So God does not exist, but is simply created by human beings who find it too hard to face human existence on their own. The French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre for example would have argued like this. And in fact to become truly human means to cast off such childish props and to look existence in the eyes.
But we could also turn this argument upside down. Maybe man does not create gods, idols and mascots because he is too scared in this cold and naked world; maybe there is a God who cares for human beings, and even the least religious can sense his presence and call. Then God would not be a sophisticated version of Tom Hanks’ volleyball; rather the bonding of man with idols, figures and masks would be a poor and somewhat misguided expression of humanity’s deepest longing to be united with its creator.
No mascot, no creature, in fact not even any human being can really understand us fully. What I sometimes feel when I come back from a trip, when it seems impossible to describe to my housemates and friends what I have experienced, is ultimately the experience of all of us: nobody understands us fully and completely all the time. This is why we often feel lonely, misunderstood, “cast away”. Yet we have this desire to share, to be understood, to have communion with others, which is why life can sometimes be frustrating.
Christianity believes that there is a being who can fully understand us, always and everywhere. God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, an early Christian writer tells us. God is not a figment of our imagination, a creation like Tom Hanks’ volleyball, but the origin of everything, the creator of the universe. He made us out of love, and he longs to be in contact with us. Maybe next time you think nobody understands you, you should turn to him. He will listen and even speak to you. Try it- Fritz the Lion would approve!
