The finding of a penny is ordinarily accepted as a simple bit of good luck. We waste little thought and no compassion on the hapless person who lost the penny. Just another careless or lazy unbeliever, we may, a bit smugly, reflect. His loss, our lucky gain!

Yet those who have had a penny slip from their grasp, only to roll irretrievably under a store counter, might wonder if there is more to it than that. (“Don't bother,” said the store clerk to the Penny Priestess, puzzled by her obvious agitation. “We sweep them out with the trash every night.”) Do we lose, find and retain our pennies entirely by virtue of our own actions or inactions? Or is there a fate, however penny ante in its scope, that guides the destiny of each and every penny?

In posing these questions, we seek to understand whether the penny falls, thereby acquiring its luck force, as a chance event or by the divine will of the Penny God. Does the God ordain the penny's fall in order to grant luck to the elect (penny supralapsarianism)? Or does the fall of the penny occur through the carelessness or impiety of humankind, and the God then turns this unfortunate event to good by endowing the fallen penny with his divine gift of luck (penny sublapsarianism)?

Our Penny Catechism teaches us that the Penny God is a benevolent trickster who eases the sufferings of humankind by bringing us the divine gift of luck under the specie of the copper coin. Trickster gods do not work in mysterious ways; in fact, they generally relish dramatic, even slapstick, effects. If the almost-almighty Penny God indeed had the power to redistribute luck with perfect goodness and justice, then surely he would do so. For example, he might cause pennies to leap from the pockets of the greedy to the hands of the needy. The fact that the Penny God does not play such amusing, if obvious, pranks is a powerful argument against the supralapsarian interpretation.

Luck operates in the middle ground between the withering anomy of Chance and the crushing force of Necessity. We know that deliberately searching for a penny will drain it of its luck. If the finding of a lucky penny must be a chance event, then perhaps the same is true for its loss. An accident, a happenstance, is required to imbue the penny with the luck force.

There may (or may not) be more powerful deities who attend the fate of each sparrow that falls to the ground and each numbered hair that clogs the bathtub drain. The Penny God does not similarly direct the fate of the penny. If it falls to the ground and rolls from sight, tough luck. But we may appeal to the sublapsarian doctrine to comfort us that it is after all a fortunate fall for someone (just not for us). The Penny Priestess devoutly hopes that her fallen penny was not indeed swept out with the trash but instead brought luck to someone in greater need of it than she.

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