'You let . . . chance . . , a pair of dice decide your life?'
`Within limits, yes.'
'How do you do it?'
For the first time her eyes brightened. Legs dangling, she listened intently as I explained briefly my option-creating,
dice deciding life.
`My God,' she said when I had finished. She stared some more. `That's wonderful.'
She paused. `First you were a professor of history; then Father Forbes, then a lover, a pander, a psychiatrist, and now
you're - the dice man.'
My face was aglow with triumph.
'Actually,' I said, `I work for "Candid Camera."
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.'