The Chaplain: The Beads Worn Smooth, the Links Unbroken

Note to Readers: This standalone short story is also included in the complete edition, The Reed & The Flame: A Collection of Short Stories of Faith and Endurance. If you already own the complete collection, you already have this story! Looking for the full journey? You can enjoy this story on its own or get all ten stories together in the collected volume. For eleven years he has said the words over the dying and believed none of them. He is a hospice chaplain, and he is good at it — better, some days, than the ones who still believe. He does not flinch. He does not leave early. He holds the hand, says the prayer, and lets the silence be what it is. No one knows the faith went out of him years ago, on the day a friend whose belief never wavered died for no reason at all. He has carried that friend's worn olive-wood rosary in his coat ever since — unable to pray it, unable to set it down. Then Agnes — a retired Latin teacher, dying, sharp, and impossible to fool — puts her beads in his hands to finish a decade her own can no longer manage, and asks him the one question he has spent eleven years not answering: Do you believe any of it? Truly? The opening story of The Reed & The Flame, a new collection from the author of The Candle, The Chaplain is a quiet, unsparing piece about whether a ministry can be real when the belief is gone — and whether faithfulness can outlive faith. Includes one interior illustration.