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Olivia Benson did not grow up believing in God.
In fact, she hadn't grown up believing in much of anything. One of the things her mother had made exceptionally clear to her was that it didn't matter what you did or didn't do, bad things were going to happen anyway. You didn't get what you deserved, you just got what hand you were dealt. And some people seemed to have been dealt much better hands than the Bensons.
While she didn't believe in God, the concept itself had always fascinated her. She'd watch some of the Catholic girls in her elementary school classes who got to leave school every now and then to attend church services. She remembered specifically her best friend in the second grade, Maria Shaw, had been so excited about making her First Holy Communion. She got to wear a pretty white dress and have a party afterwards. She'd invited Olivia and Serena to come, handing over the invitation in secret at recess.
"Mom said I can only invite one friend from school," Maria had whispered, sliding Olivia the envelope. "You have to wear a silly hat to cover your head but I hope you can come anyway."
That was back when Olivia still believed Serena could change. That if she loved her hard enough and behaved well enough her mother might start acting more like Mrs. Shaw, letting her have sleepovers and helping her pick out pretty clothes and doing her hair. So she'd given the invitation to her mother and asked politely if they could attend. It was barely dinner time but Serena was already hammered. She laughed as she ripped the invitation in half and threw it in the trash.
When Maria asked Olivia on Monday why she didn't come, Olivia lied and said her mother had gotten sick. Which wasn't really a lie if you consider the fact that she passed out on the couch in the middle of the afternoon.
As she got older, Olivia resented organized religion, even though she didn't belong to one. She thought about how unfair it was that Christianity seemed to punish women. It labeled them promiscuous for wanting to enjoy sex and forbid them for making decisions about their own childbearing, no matter the circumstances. That Olivia thought, was no way to live. To be burdened down by some overreaching guilt that seemed to shame people, but women especially, for doing things that were just natural, not to mention fun.
She decided from there on out, she would never have a church wedding. She'd never raise a child in a religion, and she'd avoid anyone who felt staunchly enough about it all to try to force their morals on her, like the girls she'd nicknamed the Purity Pack from her high school.
She wasn't sure when exactly her perspective shifted again, whether it was when she started at SVU or when she met Elliot. To be fair, both entered her life at the same time and weren't mutually exclusive, so separating them was difficult.
Elliot's faith was very important to him. He wore a cross around his neck and had one tattooed on his arm. He celebrated all the major holidays, tried to go to church every Sunday, and had the guilt and the morals to match. It should have bothered her, but just like when she was little, there was something intriguing about watching someone have such faith and such conviction in something they couldn't see, couldn't prove.
It was around this time that Olivia also started acknowledging the concept of evil. She'd never much thought about it. She knew what her biological father had done to her mother was wrong, but somehow she'd never viewed it as evil. Like Serena said, there wasn't anything you could do about the hand you were dealt.
But the more things she saw every day, the trauma, the abuse, the brutalization… there wasn't a name for it other than evil. And if evil could exist, then surely good could as well. But where did they come from? And if they existed, perhaps did that mean someone could change their outcome beyond the hand they were dealt?
It was these questions she'd wrestled with for 13 years with Elliot by her side, and there were many times they came to or nearly came to blows over issues. Often, they were over things like IVF and abortion. There was a particular case where abortion clinics were being attacked that stuck out in her mind.
"It's not the right way to go about it, but I get why they're doing it," Elliot had said in the car as they pulled away from one of the clinics after interviewing some witnesses.
"I didn't think you'd be one to empathize with perps," she said.
"I just don't get how anyone could take one look at the picture on that ultrasound machine and not be all in," Elliot said.
She knew this was his nature, to raise and protect and prosper. He was a man, and a man of faith, and he didn't understand half of what women went through, even after all this time in SVU. She was glad he never knew about her pregnancy scare with Billy in college. That asshole had been bad news from the beginning but she didn't care. She'd moved in with him and they were having wild, unprotected sex practially every night of the week. And if she hadn't gotten her period on the way to the appointment she still didn't know exactly what she would have done. But she knew what her mother would have done if given the chance.
"Well, not everyone's as lucky as Kathy that when something unexpected happens the boyfriend sticks around and takes care of things," Olivia said. "Assuming there's a boyfriend at all."
The air in the car shifted.
"But even then, Liv," he said. "I don't know how a mother could just decide to kill her baby."
"Even after all the rape victims you've seen?" she asked.
"There's adoption," he said.
"And giving birth is traumatic enough without being reminded that part of your attacker is growing inside you, feeding on you, depending on you and taking from you every day," Olivia said.
Elliot was quiet for a few minutes, letting the words resonate with him, realizing how close they hit for her.
"Your mother isn't the example of every woman, Liv," he said.
"She shouldn't have had to go through all that and then raise me," Olivia said. "It was too much for her. Can you imagine the life she could have had? It would have been better without me."
"It's not always just about the mother though," Elliot said. "Because I know for certain that if she hadn't had you, my life would be a hell of a lot worse."
His words had shocked her. One, for their honesty, but two because she hadn't really ever considered something like that. She saw her mother in every pregnant victim, in every woman who wanted an abortion, who wanted the freedom to choose how to live their own lives. She hadn't really considered that the people those babies grew up to be could provide something to someone else's life. The subtext of his confession was enough to prick her eyes with tears: he was happy and thankful that she was alive.
Her belief in God or some kind of deity only strengthened when she met the devil himself, William Lewis. The time she spent duct taped to that chair, in that trunk, and handcuffed to that bed, she prayed for the very first time in her life. Well, maybe not the very first. She'd noticed herself once or twice chanting mantras in her head when Elliot was shot, stabbed, blown up, or blinded in the line of duty, hoping and wishing for his recovery. But her encounter with Lewis was the first time she ever prayed to someone.
Frankly, she wasn't quite sure if she was praying to God or Elliot. She wanted so badly to be rescued but those were the only two names floating around in her head. They were intrinsically linked. She believed in Elliot and Elliot believed in God and one of them would save her. If she was honest with herself, she'd wanted it to be Elliot, but he never came. Instead, she saved herself, twice.
Then Noah came along.
She wasn't really sure what prompted her to enter the little Unitarian Church near their apartment one day while they were out on a walk. There'd been other people streaming in, and she and Noah were dressed nicely enough, so she went in and sat in the back. She read through one of the bulletins while Noah sat in her lap and looked around, and she was amazed by what she read.
This religion, unlike other forms of Christianity she'd been exposed to in her life, believed not in the Trinity, but in one single deity. While it acknowledged Jesus as a savior, he was not God but rather a messenger for God. They also rejected ideas of original sin, predestination, and the unquestionable truth of the bible.
She'd never heard something quite like that before, a religion that allowed for free choice, and reason, and thought, while still finding root in traditional beliefs. The service itself and the preacher endeared her more. When they got home, all she could think about was the service and something Elliot had said to her once after a tough case:
"Raising your kid in a religion gives them something to hold onto, even when they feel like everything else is gone," he'd said.
She couldn't remember the exact case or context, but she had remembered how it annoyed her at the time. Another slight dig he could throw her way as one of those things only parents seem to understand. At the time she wasn't one, but now? Would it be so bad to take him to that church on Sundays? To teach him about good and evil but with the right respect to question things in the world around him that didn't make sense? To watch him grow and explore this universe while having some form of guiding principles to ground him?
She was on the phone before she knew it, calling the church office and scheduling a baptism for the following month. Her entire team was there, celebrating, but it was painfully obvious the one face, the one that would have been most shocked to see it happen at all, was absent.
As Noah did grow older, they weren't every Sunday churchgoers but they went enough. Noah would read things and ask questions, and Olivia realized that she wanted him to have a tie to religion, but she didn't want to pick it for him. Even though Unitarianism seemed to be where Olivia felt most comfortable, she wanted Noah to have an active voice in picking what and where he wanted to worship. And that gave her an idea.
"Noh, have you ever been curious about other religions?" Olivia asked. "I know some of your friends have different beliefs than we do and I just wondered if you ever thought about them."
"Sometimes," Noah said after swallowing a bite of pizza. "Like Parker's church has a ton of rules."
Parker was Catholic.
"And Deondre's church has a really cool choir," Noah said. "They even let him sing in it sometimes."
Deondre was Baptist.
"And Uncle John gets to wear that cool little hat when he goes to services," Noah said.
The last time they'd visited Munch he'd been at a funeral for a second cousin earlier in the day and had forgotten to take his yamaka off, which prompted a lot of questions from Noah.
"Would you want to go to some of these other churches and places of worship and learn more about them?" Olivia asked.
"That would be so neat," Noah said.
That was about three years ago and Olivia made it a point to try to take in services at different worship sites and locations whenever they could.
That's how she and Noah found themselves in a back pew at a Presbyterian church near their apartment on Christmas Eve. The service was beautiful. They'd dimmed the lights and let the worship space fill with the soft flicker of candles. Everyone was dressed beautifully and the choir sounded angelic. She kept glancing at Noah out of the corner of her eye, watching his reactions to taking everything in. She wondered, as she always did, if this would be the one he would claim as his own and it would stick.
During the sermon, she thought about a Catholic church across the river, how it was probably holding the remnants of the Stabler family tonight. She'd gone to a few Catholic masses over the years for weddings and funerals. She knew they'd be kneeling and sitting and standing, and shaking hands and singing way too many verses of every song. She and Noah hadn't taken in a Catholic Mass together yet. It wasn't that she'd been avoiding one, it just never felt like the right time. But when she thought about it now, that they could go some weekend with Elliot and Eli and Bernie and then maybe go out to eat and spend the night together afterwards, it no longer seemed as daunting. It was something she'd almost look forward too, and the level of shock that would register on Elliot's face when she brought it up would be worth its weight in gold.
While she still wasn't completely sure what higher powers she believed in, she liked to think that there truly was a heaven and hell. That her mother, and her brother, and Ed, and Kathy had found the peace they couldn't get on earth. She liked to believe William Lewis was burning in hell and it was his choices in life, not the hand he'd been dealt that had sent him there.
She liked to think that maybe divine timing was true. Perhaps God knew Olivia needed to grow and needed to learn how to stand on her own without Elliot there as a crutch. Maybe He knew Kathy's time was nearly up, in any form, and that Elliot would need her to make it through. Maybe, somewhere in all the chaos she was starting to believe that everything did, in fact, happen for a reason.
She didn't think she'd be 53 and sitting in a church pew on Christmas Eve when that revelation finally came to her, but as she reached to put an arm around her son and join the choir in singing "O Holy Night," she wasn't particularly sorry that it did.