THERE'S ALWAYS THE HUMAN ELEMENT

 It was many years ago during the Offertory of the Family Eucharist on Christmas Eve. MacKenzie, who was always forthright and to the point was sitting next to his Mom. The ushers were taking the collection. When they came to MacKenzie, he turned to his mother and said in a stage whisper, "Mom, why do we have to pay to go to church? Our oldest, Christy, who was sitting with Arlena and her sisters in front of MacKenzie, overheard MacKenzie's question. She so wanted to turn around and answer: "So that my sisters can go to college."

There is always the human element, isn't there? When we get to the subject of money, there is always the human element, perhaps especially when it comes to the subject of money. Sometimes I think humanity doesn't get any lower than it does when it comes to that subject. Our lowest, basest instincts come to the fore when we are talking about money: how it is raised, how it is spent, what it is to be used for, and so forth, and not just any money: our money, my money.

And as MacKenzie so innocently and so honestly noted, even in church we are not immune to the baseness of the reality of money. It is not only Congress, Legislatures, School Boards and County Commissions who have to argue about and grovel over money, so do churches, although groveling and arguing are unseemly in church settings. We just beg and pass the plate. But, again, it is the human element from which we cannot escape.

This is not a plea to support your local parish. That would be unseemly of me! It is simply a reminder that no matter how spiritual we may think we are or are to be, and no matter how spiritual we believe the church is and is to be, we can never escape the human element. Nor should we. If we could or should, Jesus would never have come among us. But Jesus, the Son of God, became one of us, immersed himself in our world and in our life, in the human element, not to condemn it but to sanctify it and to remind us that we can't encounter the divine without first encountering the human. Rather, the human and the divine are two sides to the same coin.

It is another way of saying that we can't get there from here. As a church we are always confronted with the human element. Whether that element is as base as money or as majestic as a bricks‑and‑mortar edifice, we are surrounded by the human, the earthly all the time. The only escape is eternity, which most of us are not in that much of a hurry to encounter. In the meantime our encounters are very much of this world and very much of the human variety. And they are as simple, as earthy and as base (as in basic) as Christy's wanted‑to‑say words to MacKenzie.

There is no escaping the human element in everything we think or do or say, in everything we are, even in the midst of a celebrating profoundly spiritual event as the Eucharist, and the Christmas Eucharist at that. I don't know if MacKenzie was shocked, surprised or scandalized by having to "pay" to go to church. I hope he was merely amused. Come to think of it, so was Christy, so was I when she told me the story and so should we be when we realize that the human element follows us everywhere. Smile.