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The Penny Priestess was once a penny agnostic. She picked up pennies, half from a vague belief they were lucky, half from the same tidy instinct that impelled her to pick up nickels, dimes and quarters. They might or might not be lucky; they were certainly negotiable, and therefore they ought not be wasted. So pick them up she did.
In her day job, she was at that time a hack of all trades, a writer-for-hire, mostly on drearily technical subjects. Aspiring to higher or at least higher-paying things, she prepared a large stack of query letters addressed to editors, agents and book packagers offering her services.
On her way to the post office, she spied a penny twinkling on the sidewalk, as if intended specially for her. This seemed like a very good omen. Such a penny must be special! She put it in a desk drawer for safe keeping.
She had received a religious upbringing. From earliest childhood she had been taught that the world was created and governed by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good deity who loved her very much. He held the whole world in his hands. He knew when she was sleeping; he knew when she was awake; he knew when she’d been bad or good. If she was good, and met certain other technical requirements, she would go to heaven, a place of eternal joy and hosanna-ing.
The innocent child who was to become the Penny Priestess loved speculating about eternity and infinity and the goodness of God. She tried to imagine counting all the grains of sand in the sea (though she had never seen the ocean) and then to imagine how much more infinite God was. She looked down at all the tiny things creeping through the grass and up at the multitudes of stars and thought how God was more infinite than these! And he was her invisible friend, watching and guarding all her movements and even reading her thoughts, which she tried to keep holy and pure.
The confused adolescent who was to become the Penny Priestess slowly realized there were some intellectual problems with her religion greater than the difficulties of numbering the grains of sand in the sea or the stars of the heavens. The evidence for the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good deity rested upon a heavily edited but largely incomprehensible tome, plus the say-so of the very adults who were wrong about pretty much everything else. She wondered whether she was in fact loved and protected by an all-powerful deity or was just plain lucky.
Although she herself had never suffered greater evils than a bout of pneumonia and some minor bullying and unfairness, she realized that life—and, of course, death—could be terrible, in fact, was terrible, for untold millions of suffering creatures. Any god who held the whole world in his hands must be using it for a soccer ball. She lost her faith, but she retained a certain propensity for theological quibbling, plus a wish there was something out there worth quibbling about.
But what about those queries? She heard first from a book packager seeking a writer for a mass market book on a topic she just happened to know quite a bit about. (Not that that mattered.) The advance and royalties were ridiculously small, but it was a real byline. As luck would have it, the little book did well, eventually selling over 200,000 copies. Then she heard from an editor who needed someone, quick, to rewrite a book. This required working through her summer vacation, but never mind that, she did it. The bylined author liked her work and found more for her to do. It was boring stuff, actually, but it was regular and it paid.
To what did she owe this good fortune, if not to the penny? If lost-and-found pennies were imbued with luck, who had so endowed them? Some more-than-human force or presence must do so—the Penny God! Her mind dwelt on these mysteries and whenever she found another penny, she meditated upon its hidden portent.
The Penny-Priestess-in-Becoming realized she was onto something. Myths and religions evolve to explain the things that different cultures feel need explaining: Where does the sun go to at night? What happens to us when we die? The religion in which she had been catechized as a child asked questions that were not always pertinent and provided answers that were fundamentally unpersuasive. Why not a brand-new religion of her very own, one that better explained the things she felt to be in need of an explanation: Why do the wicked prosper? Why do the innocent suffer? What does it take to get a real book published?
She shared her burgeoning belief in the Penny God with her friend Sally, who, soon converted, began to collect lucky pennies for herself. It was Sally, in fact, who named her the Penny Priestess. And so she discovered at last her true vocation.
Building on her good fortune, she sent out more query letters, wrote book proposals, got an agent—and seemed bound for bigger and better things, especially as she continued to find lucky pennies and to deposit them, reverently and hopefully, in her lucky penny jar. None of those pennies seemed to be quite as lucky as the original penny. Some frankly disagreeable events transpired. Book proposals were sold that then came unsold. The Penny Priestess learned the hard way that legal contracts only bind the weaker party to do what the stronger party tells them to do.
Despite these disappointments, the Penny Priestess did not waiver in her faith. Instead, she was inspired to probe more deeply into the mysteries of the penny divinity. Perhaps the luck of those pennies was exhausted in warding off terrible diseases and dire accidents headed her way? Perhaps, more simply, there is only so much luck to go around, or else it wouldn’t be luck? The Penny God has a lot of people to take care of, and (unlike some other gods) he can’t be everywhere at once, can he? Or, if the Penny God is a trickster god, had she arrogantly presumed too much on her past good luck? Or, or—could it be that the Penny God had reserved for her a special destiny: to be his priestess in truth, and to bring his holy message to the world?
These are the sort of yearning and pestering questions that we so often ask our gods—who, instead of answering, place their holy hands before their divine lips, to hide perhaps a smile, perhaps a yawn.
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