Photograph by Dollar Gill via Unsplash

IF is a delightful film starring Cailey Fleming as Bea, a 12-year-old girl charged with helping place abandoned imaginary friends (termed IFs in the film – said like “if”) with potential new placements, and Ryan Reynolds as Cal, her mentor who teaches her the ins and outs of working with IFs. Part of a slew of kids’ movies this summer season, it has plenty of whimsy and wonder that will make even the most hardened viewer think back fondly to their childhood and strive to find the wonder in the everyday. For me, the movie made me ask: what if God is an imaginary friend?

Now, stay with me for a moment. The movie has a particular understanding of IFs, and it even offers a definitive answer to the question of whether IFs are “real,” or simply in one’s imagination, but that doesn’t matter for what I’m suggesting, and plus, it would be a major spoiler. There is no way to prove that God exists, and if you talk to different people, they have different opinions, and, perhaps more importantly, different conceptions of the God who does or does not exist. You can’t see God, but you can have a relationship with them. How is that all that different than how IF treats imaginary friends?

The movie makes the case that far from being irrelevant or relegated to childhood fantasy, IFs continue to have an impact on the adults. We see them helping people have strength in times of deep crisis, calming anxiety, and being a constant companion. The movie makes the case that IFs are important and that human beings and the magical beings exist in a mutually constitutive relationship. IFs need us to come into being, and we need them to live lives of flourishing.

Such ideas are not far off from the theological. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reframed the relationship between God and people to say that we need one another equally. Without people, God would exist, but there would not be conscious beings to know it. Without God, we might have moments of transcendence, but nothing to tether them to. We need one another.

Likewise, IFs come in all different shapes and sizes. The movie showcases IFs as giant cats, knights, dragons, artwork-come-to-life, bubbles, toxic ooze, a marshmallow caught on fire, a rat magician, and giant purple Yeti reminiscent of the character design from Monsters, Inc. In the same way, people’s experience of God varies, and the images we use to name the sacred differ from person to person. One of the best bits of writing about this comes from Lauren Winner’s Wearing God, which explores some of the more obscure names and images of God, including clothing and laughter. God can be king and clothing, servant and light, fire and mother hen, and that malleability is a wonderful gift to people of faith. 

Recently, I was struck by an archaeologist’s statement about Göbekli Tepe, which has been described as the first temple in history. The main structure is a set of concentric pillars with depictions of different animals carved into them. Many of them are striking, and all were made from 9,000-11,000 years ago.  Looking at the heaps of rubble that had been unearthed, archaeologist Jens Notroff said simply, “without any imagination, this is all a pile of rubbish.”

The same is true of our world. We must have imagination, and that includes in our spiritual life. Without it, the world lacks magic and wonder. Imagination doesn’t mean that it’s fake – it means that it exceeds reality. Surely that is a decent definition of God as well – the One Who Exceeds Reality. After IF, I’ve come to think of God as my imaginary friend, pushing me towards wonder and the power of imagination. Whether that God is “real” or not seems to me like the least interesting question of all – the important thing is that God matters and that we open ourselves to wonder.