Fearless Girl

By Fred Vilbig

They recently installed a new statue on Wall Street. It’s called “Fearless Girl.” The Fearless Girl statue was installed directly in front of the famous Charging Bull statue. It depicts a defiant little girl facing down a raging bull.

I sincerely hope that no young girl is literally inspired by this statue. Bulls on average weigh 2,500 pounds. An angry bull is nothing to trifle with. If you are ever threatened by an angry bull, back away slowly toward a fence or a wall (assuming you can scale the wall quickly, of course) without further alarming the bull. If the bull starts to charge, you should run in a zig-zag pattern as fast as you can in the general direction of that fence or wall. If you’re lucky, you may be able to outmaneuver it like a bullfighter. If not, you’ll be dead.

With all due respect, I think that the statue was misnamed. At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, it should be called “unwise girl.” The idea of the statue must have come from a city-dweller who has never encountered an angry bull. Like I said, you don’t trifle with an angry bull.

In thinking about the statue, though, I thought it was kind of emblematic of a lot of things going on in our society. We have a kind of comic-book mentality. Like a little girl thinking she can fearlessly face down a raging bull, we think that if we imagine something hard enough, we can somehow make it real.

I for one do not subscribe to that line of thought. I know that imagining I can run as fast as Usain Bolt will not make it happen. I know that envisioning a basketball shot that Stephen Curry can make will not under any circumstances allow me to make that shot. I know that I will fall to my death if I jump off a cliff no matter how much I want to fly. The problem with reality is that it is real.

In our society, we seem to imagine that we can ignore the laws of physics and other laws of nature, much less the laws of God. We think that we can be something that we’re not just by imagining it hard enough. We want to call something what it is not just because we don’t like the way it is. We want to bend reality to our own will; but the bottom line is that reality is what we have, no matter how you feel about it.

Every Sunday at Mass, Catholics recite the ancient statement of our faith, the Nicene Creed. The opening line of that creed is relevant to this reflection:

I believe in one God
The Father almighty
The Maker of Heaven and earth,
Of all things visible and invisible.

God made everything. If God didn’t make it, not only is it not “real,” but it doesn’t exist. God created all things in a word, in fact in the Word, and there is literally nothing outside of what God created.

Like so many people in our society, the “Fearless Girl” doesn’t want to accept reality. She wants things her way. But that is just unreal.

If we choose that unreal world, God will respect that, but the end will not be good. Although you and I can imagine things, we cannot create anything real. I fear that if people chose to follow those fantasy paths, they will end up alone in a cold, dark place. God gave us free will, and He will respect our choices. The problem is that some of our choices will have horrible consequences.

Instead of making up a comic-book world where we imagine we will be happy, we should choose God’s way. After all, God is the Creator of what is real. God’s only real wish is that we love Him and end up in Heaven with Him where we will be blissfully happy for all eternity. And that’s not a bad thing.