Ellen Cooney’s novel, One Night Two Souls Went Walking is not an easy book to read, but it’s beautiful. It’s not easy to read about a chaplain’s loss of faith. How does a chaplain talk about the soul with dying people when she herself has lost her belief?

The unnamed interfaith chaplain is on the night rounds of the hospital, always on the night rounds after budget cuts that slashed staffing from the department. “Surveys” say people don’t have religion in the U.S., so why do they need chaplains in the hospital? But, ever since she was a child, a contemplative child in a family of loud athletes, she has pondered the soul, and yearned to be a priest. She trained for chaplaincy and was ordained an Episcopal priest, to the wonderment of her Catholic family who no longer attended church. At thirty-six, she’s a chaplain for everyone.

The chaplain keeps her loss of faith a secret because she’s expected to have answers for those people who want to talk about souls or angels or the light. She has a gift for telling certain things at certain times to people, things that might not be based on factual reality. But, does everything need to “have explanations or they didn’t really happen”? What about the lawyer who described his tour of the hospital from above, seeing things that the chaplain only later noticed? Or, the woman who described the bright light as she died? What does she say? “I believe in expecting light, even when it feels like a lie, because the eyes of souls see what plain old eyes do not.”

The chaplain’s crisis of faith stems from her own personal life. But, it takes pair of rescue dogs, therapy dogs, to allow her to see what she can’t explain. Bobo Boy is actually dead, but she catches glimpses of him. However, it’s her interaction with another therapy dog, a boxer named Eddie, that rescues her physically and emotionally, as Eddie accompanies her one night.

One Night Two Souls Went Walking doesn’t feel as if it’s a book set in middle America. It feels as if it’s set in Britain. There’s a quietness, a poetic feeling to the book that reminds me of British novels. It’s a book that discusses death and souls and grace, and allows the reader to form their own opinion. For the chaplain, there comes a moment when she realizes what the word “grace” means. “It means that suddenly there comes a moment when you are all right.”

Ellen Cooney’s website is https://ellencooney.com/

One Night Two Souls Went Walking by Ellen Cooney. Coffee House Press, 2020. ISBN 9781566895972 (paperback), 199p.

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