Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels tohen uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

Every day, dozens of men walk into Lucky's, buy a cup of coffee and some plastic donuts, then plunk down thirty dollars on scratch tickets. These same men return day after day, week after week, laying down thousands of dollars a year on pieces of paper that could barely serve as bookmarks. Those same thousands could pay off credit card bills, car loans, or go into the Magellen fund for a boring eight percent a year insuring riches well into retirement. Yet, even knowing how ridiculous the odds were, these same dozens will continue to put their thousands into bookmarks.

These men think they believe in the eternal certainties of fate. To them, like the poor women of Canterbury, The Wheel of Fortune depicts the actions of fate. For a certain period of time, all of your luck will run bad and the wheel carries you lower. The crops will die, the bills will come due, you will spill coffee on yourself and bad hair days abound as you ride down the wheel. And then, just as it gets unbearable, the wheel will turn upwards and it will be roses and free drinks for months. When fate turns, you best have a lottery ticket.

However, if you accept the idea of fate at all, you must see it as an intricate pattern of life and death. God, Buddha or the laws of mathematics cause everything to happen. This includes not only wars and martyrs, but also births, deaths, train departures and chance meetings in the men's room. In short, all activities are woven into this fabric no matter how slight or insubstantial. As a result, humans can not choose what their futures will be nor what they will have for dinner. All of that is woven into the tapestry of fate. Even further, there are no laws of probability, because there can be no random events. Everything has been foretold.

However, just because it has been foretold does not mean that we can ever understand fate. Poor Pip saw what was foretold; he saw God's foot on the treadle of the loom, weaving the threads of history and the future. This knowledge drove him mad, for "man's insanity is heaven's sense." His mind could not comprehend the enormity of the plan or the sense of heaven. However, I suspect that the madness comes from another source. I believe that what drove Pip mad was the knowledge of his own insignificance. If Fate is a large, all encompassing tapestry, then our own parts are as small as the fibers that make up one thread. Alone on that sea, Pip realized how small he is. Pip learned that our lives are less consequential than coral, where at least in death their corpses build a wall.

Those who are truly religious and believe in the omnipotence and omniscience of God (and by consequence, fate), know how worthless they are. This worthlessness was termed "peace" by Thomas a Becket in Murder in the Cathedral. You achieve and realize this peace by realizing your own insignificance to God and then trusting his pattern. All of the tempters offer Becket the illusion that he could do anything about his life, however Becket knows his own worthlessness and insignificance . He has no choice. Noone does.

In the end, the Lucky's players are missing this humility. They believe that their futures really matter to God, that the wheel will turn, and that they can help fate along. However, there is no greater show of egotism than a lucky penny. Its egotism does not arise from the penny's hope, but from the holder's presumption that he could understand the mind of God. Your penny does not control anything. To presume that it could is the worst arrogance. This arrogance does not change your fate (how could it?), but it does remove you from peace. In the final lights, we may have no choice about the divinity that shapes our ends. We may have no choice about the cancer, the heart disease or the bus that will shuffle us off this mortal coil, but we do choose how we go to that end. As Hamlet said, in the end "The readiness is all."