Invertianity

My old school chum Chad just posted this as his status on facebook:

"Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece and became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became an institution; it moved to Europe and became a culture; it came to America and became an enterprise."

Not sure exactly how that can be his status... unless he's in the middle of Graduate Studies in Awesome... but the point is incisive. The question that comes to my mind is, what is it that ties all of that together? What has the essence been of that big, blobular entity "Christianity" since it's inception?

I think, with the exception of the first few years, that there is a one-word tie that binds and that is: "Control". There is power in both the idea of spirituality and in the spirit itself. I think this is because spirit is the unifying principle, the metaphysical "theory of everything" that enables us in very small ways to have an holistic outlook on life.

The problem is that coinciding with a universal human yearning for unity and meaning and connection is a fear that such a state is not possible and a corresponding feeling that the best way to get around the difficulty is to take a short cut by creating a realm in which we can control things into place, to make them fit into a preconceived (and ridiculously small) notion of how they ought to be.

The problem with this is that we have enough of the Divine within us to enable us to excerpt small portions for our piffling worldview constructions. For someone not looking too closely, these bits and pieces can give intimations of the bigger, holistic Divine Truth such that the constructions almost start to seem Real. They aren't, and because they are fractional truths that pretend to be the whole truth, they lose their integrity at the start and most often end up taking on the lesser, more poopy attributes of the people who are creating them.

Like Americans and their Credit Card Christianity. Poopy. Veerrry Poopy.

Bottom line: try to control the truth - become instead controlled by the evil that lurks within the hearts of us all. Try instead to become controlled by truth, and become free in the measure by which you succeed. Why did the Palestinian Christians succeed? Because they'd just touched frickin' divinity, and hadn't yet forgotten the upside-down kingdom. They were the beleaguered, marginalized, oppressed few who did not have the option to control things, and so instead they became Socialists free of our current slavery to monetary gain, able instead to live in Love and Community, which we have all but lost.

This is why I tend to put the word "Christianity" in quotation marks, because it's a word that gets bandied about so much by the powermongerers and control-monkeys that it has become almost entirely associated with their slavery and madness. I'd like to reject that, reclaim the term, and find my identity once again in the Upside-Down King. I just don't know if I can do that without the re-conceptualization involved in re-naming it.

Suggestions?

"Invertianity", perhaps?