'THERE WILL BE A SECOND COLLECTION'.

We ushers bow before the altar, and the pastor gives us a friendly but level glance. I think of that 1936 Mae West film, Klondike Annie. Fleeing a murder charge and disguised as settlement worker Annie Alden, she leads a revival in rowdy gold-rush Alaska. After the hymn she gives the seedy ushers an astute once-over, then picks two one-armed men for the collection. Our pastor is more trusting.

I piston the basket across laps and necks and it elicits a smile or two, especially from children. But more often its reward is sighs, groans, and body shifts, the annoyance of the faithful that the basket dims the afterglow of a good homily, strong-arms them into charity. I empathize. I'll be vexed if I make it to the City of God only to find it thriving on a baksheesh economy.

Quirks of giving lighten the task. Single dollar bills land in the basket thrice folded, like green sticks of Wrigleys. Fives, tens, and better, alight as flat as magic carpets. Sometimes I startle somebody still thumbing a wallet for that elusive single from among grander denominations.

The basket routine and I represent where the church stands in securing money for worldly ends and demands. Early Christians, under the charming proto-Marxism described in Acts 4:32-36, managed money and property communally. The medieval decimae, or obligation of a tenth of one's annual income, was also risky to dodge: Gregory VII deemed holdouts sacrilegious and implicitly damned. Before the end of the Civil War, American Catholics paid ushers at the church door a dime each to enter for Mass or devotions. An aghast Sacred Congregation for the Propaganda halted that in an 1869 letter to the U.S. bishops.

Christ assured Peter that the gates of hell won't prevail against his church, but today high water can prevail against pastors as extortionate February heating bills, the salaries of teachers and gravediggers, a new church roof, the plight of the poor. Seemingly, there's no way around the regular collection.

Is it an embarassment or an opportunity? That's the question bedeviling the fictional pastors of J.F. Powers's Wheat That Springeth Green. One banishes it from Mass via a single annual family donation of five hundred dollars (in 1968) for pew rental, school tuition, and Peter's Pence. His gambit owes to a memory that shreds him in alcoholic middle age, of when he and a fellow seminary graduate from the same home parish jointly celebrated their first Masses and how their pastor, Father William Stock--locally derided as Dollar Bill--sprang a surprise second collection and announced that they would be taking it up.

Once we ushers finish, we empty our baskets into a blue Wal-Mart container by the vestibule door, and the chief usher locks it up until the pastor, and only the pastor, fetches it. Meanwhile, we retrace our steps to our pews, garnering more benign looks than we had elicited while collecting.

I doubt that many contemplate the collection as carefully as the aftermath of receiving Communion. The collection is simply over; the Eucharist is sacramental. Yet, my weekly ushering has helped me hear a sacramental overtone, aside from the inarguable moral impetus toward charity. The collection offers a moment of transcendence, a time to assert publicly where money actually ranks, and to put ourselves on the line about it. Whether we come across with little or much, the mere gesture can be a spiritually lightening experience.

Often I wonder how our parish would get money had Rome never hit the U.S. bishops with that 1869 letter. I dislike seeing myself and my fellows sliding plastic through sensors in the vestibule. The scene isn't implausible: in 1992, Bishop William E. McManus, retired bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend, openly advocated a credit-card debit system. I relish even less the parish going online for collections--ushers and baskets once and for all exiled. Again, we just have to be there physically to part with that money, set spiritus mundi in its place, in peace let it go and in the bargain do tangible good. Back in 1958 my English teacher, Sister M. Bernardine, I.H.M., had us memorize pertinent stanzas about alms from James Russell Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal; several lines remain embedded in my gray matter, especially the ones about selfless charity feeding Christ unawares, hungering neighbors; more so, that the gift without the giver is bare.

John Christie teaches English at Indiana State University.