Terry paled: it took two minutes for me to reassure her that I'd been joking. When she'd recovered or seemed to have
recovered, she smiled her soft smile, looked up at me, grinned and then began giggling. She giggled for about two
more minutes and stopped. She took a handkerchief from a pocket in her suit jacket and wiped away the tears. Biting
at her lower lip but trying to look me in the eye, she said quietly: `I think I might like to try to be a - dice woman.'
`It will be good for you,' I said.
`It can't be any worse.'
`That's the spirit.'
As a matter of fact Terry and I got nowhere at first. She was too apathetic and skeptical to obey dice decisions except
in the most perfunctory way. Her apathy led her to create unimaginative options, or, when I pressed her to be more
daring, to disobey the die.
It was almost two weeks later that we finally had a session, which led to her breakthrough into belief in the dicelife.
She was the one who got to the core of the problem `I … I'm having trouble … believing. I have to have … faith, but I
don't…'
She trailed off.
`I know,' I said slowly. `The dice-life is related to having faith, to religion, to genuine religion.'
There was a silence.
`Yes, Father,' she said, and gave me a rare smile.
I smiled back at her and continued `A healthy skepticism is an essential ingredient of genuine religion.'
'Yes, Father,' she said, still smiling.
I leaned back is my chair. `Maybe I ought to preach to you.'
I flipped a die onto the desk between us. It said yes to the lecture. I frowned.
`I'm listening,' she said as I continued my pause.
`This may sound Father Forbesish, but who am I to question the will of the Die?'
I stared at her and we both looked solemn. `Christ's message is clear: you must lose yourself to save yourself. You
must give up personal, worldly desires, become poor in spirit. By surrendering your personal will to the whim of the
die you are practicing precisely that self-abnegation prescribed in the scriptures.'
She looked at me blankly as if listening but not understanding.
`Do you see,' I went on, `that the only selfless action is one not dictated by the self?'
She frowned.
`I can see that following the dice might be selfless, but I thought the Church wanted us to overcome sinfulness on our
own.'
I tipped forward and stretched forth an arm to take one of Terry's little hands in my own. I felt - and naturally looked
totally sincere in what I was saying.
`Listen carefully, Terry. What I'm about to say contains the wisdom of the world's great religions. If a man overcomes
what he calls sinfulness by his own willpower, he increases his ego-pride, which, according to even the Bible, is the
very foundation stone of sin. Only when sin is overcome by some external forces does the man realize his own
insignificance; only then is pride eliminated. As long as you strive as an individual self for the good, you will either
have failure - and an accompanying guilt - or pride, which is simply the basic form of evil. Guilt or pride: those are the
gifts of self. The only salvation lies in having faith.'
`But faith in what?' she asked.
`Faith in God,' I answered.
She looked puzzled.
`But what happened to the dice?' she asked.
`Look. I'm going to read a passage to you from a sacred book. Listen carefully.'
I reached into my desk and brought out some notes I'd been making lately in connection with my evolving dice theory
and, after browsing a half-minute to find what I was looking for, I began reading. ` 'Verily it is not a blasphemy when I teach: Over all things stand the heaven Accident, the heaven innocence, the heaven Prankishness, the heaven Chance. And Chance is the most ancient Divinity of the world, and behold, I come to deliver all things from their bondage under Purpose and to restore on the throne to reign over all things the heaven Chance. The mind is in bondage to Purpose and Will, but I shall free it to Divine Accident and Prankishness when I teach that in all, one thing is impossible: reason. A little wisdom is possible indeed, just enough to confuse things nicely, but this blessed certainty I have found in every atom, molecule, substance, plant, creature or star: they would
rather dance on the feet of Chance.
`Oh heaven over me pure and high! Now that I have learned that there is no purposeful eternal spider and no spider
web of reason, you have become for me a dance floor for divine accidents; you have become a divine table for divine
dice and dice players. But my listeners blush? Do I speak the unspeakable? Do I blaspheme, wishing to bless you?'
I ended my reading and after checking to see if there might be more related material I looked up.
`I didn't recognize it,' Terry said.
`It's Zarathustra. But did you understand it?'
`I don't know. I liked it. I liked something about it very much. But I don't - I don't see why I should have faith in the
dice. I guess that's the trouble.'
`Not a sparrow falls to the ground that God does not see.'
`I know.'
`Can a single die fall to the table unseen by God?'
`No, I guess not.'
`Do you remember the great ending to the Book of Job? God speaks from the whirlwind and asks Job how he can
presume to question the ways of God. For three long, beautiful chapters God indicts man's abysmal ignorance and
impotence. He says things like: 'Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? . . .'
Or 'Who shut in the sea with doors, when it burst forth from the womb?'
And 'have you commanded the morning since your days began?'
'Have the gates of death been revealed to you?'
On and on God rubs it in to poor Job, but stylishly - in the most beautiful poetry in the world - and Job realizes that he
has been wrong in complaining and questioning. His last words to the Lord are 'I know that thou canst do all
