Is God Watching?

As I read Mercy, I marked pages and specific lines that stood out to me
for one reason or another, as is my custom with most books. In going
back over the pages, I noticed that I had unwittingly marked mostly
quotes that correlated to each other, quotes about God and faith. I was
raised Roman Catholic, and attended Catholic school for 14 years. I
took theology class every day and went to mass at least once a week. I
was raised to believe.

But sometimes things happen that shake your faith, and I think that
because I have had that experience, I can relate to some of the things
that not-Andrea expresses. True, a lot of her quotes are blasphemous,
and most likely meant simply to shock. Those words are expressed by
Andrea the adult, the angry woman, lashing out. The words that struck
me the most came from Andrea the child, the part of the story that I
see most as being autobiographical.

Andrea had something happen to her when she was young. I want to
emphasize happen TO her because what occurred was out of her control.
It was not her fault, no matter how much she may blame herself. She had
been raised to believe in God, a God that wants the best for His
children. She went to temple and Hebrew school and did all the things
that she was told that she should to make God happy. But still
something horrible happened to her.

What happened to me was not what happened to Andrea, but I cannot say
that it was more or less bad. No one hurt me, no one touched me.
Nothing like that. Just like what happened to Andrea, what happened to
me should not happen to any child, it is just simply not fair…or at
least that is what all of the adults around me have always said. I
remember wondering why people said that, why how I was feeling would
change if I were older. Why it would be less horrible and wrong and
unfair. But I never told anyone that. I never knew it was something
someone else thought. And then Andrea wrote this:

"…I cried because I wanted God to know something had happened and I was
a child and I wanted God to say why it was less bad if I wasn't a child
because I was still the same me if I was or if I wasn't…. And for the
first time I wanted to be grown up because all the adults said it was
less bad."

We discussed at length in class early in the semester why we feel,
collectively as a society and as a microcosm of that society, our
class, that horrible things are more horrible when they happen to a
child. We tried to explain it but we never really quite got there. I
know that I never have.

I do know that like young Andrea, I was angry at God. I had to blame
someone because something happened TO me, something that I could not
blame myself for, or so everyone told me. At least Andrea had a
tangible person to blame, a man who had hurt her. But still, she did
not know that man, that man did not know her. God knows her, God
created her, God is supposed to watch over her. If there is a God, if
God really loves us, then why does He let horrible things happen? Why
does He let them happen to children? Was it really that He was looking
away for a second like Andrea thinks? Was He too busy to notice what
was happening to us? Or was He there, letting it happen?