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Amazing post.
I understand fully what you mean by this essence or power of Christ drawing people near even though there is so much shit and corruption that surrounds it. What I find amazing is that those of completely different faiths and beliefs also connect to this character of Jesus or this essence of the ‘Christ’. During the British occupation of Calcutta, they set up Christian schools of which the Bengali people sent their children and of course they were taught all about Christianity and Jesus and the Bible etc. Among these students were the likes of Ra Mohan Roy, Vivekananda and Ghandi, the great people behind the Bengali Renaissance and the eventual call of the emancipation of Indians from colonial rule. These people saw the corruption embedded with Christianity, recognised the hypocrisy of its teachings, saw the oppression of the Christian missionaries, yet all of them could not help but be drawn to Jesus. They just saw some incredible power about him, whether or not they believed him to be the son of God who rose from the dead, and they identified him or the Christ as being a central element to all spirituality. This is also true with many Pagans, who again rejected Christianity in its entirety, but could not ignore Jesus. It was the Hindu reformers that came up with the concept of Universal Reconciliation, in that all walks of faith and spirituality are connections to the greater truth, and that all are valid, and set up churches encouraging people of all walks of life to attend, setting the likes of Jesus and Buddha as central figures in their teachings.
I resonate with this too. As the days go by and I realise more and more how toxic Christianity is, I am still held fast by Jesus. I think this is because everything that is Christianity, from Acts to the present day, was forged by men. Its as if Jesus preached the ultimate in spirituality along with the likes of Buddha, and then people came along and immediately fucked it up, some would call it the great deception of the Devil, that we have been deceived into idolizing the Bible, and looking to the likes of Paul and Peter and the Old Testament prophets and never just full focusing on Jesus. In my three years of attending church every Sunday, I recognised only two sermons on Jesus when he is the only person I want to know about, everything else was just background noise.
I think if we were to completely destroy Christianity as it is now, and start again from scratch based just purely, on the teachings of Jesus alone, it would no longer be called Christianity as we know it. And I see what you mean about this needing to belong, or this needing of a label, but as people have already said, its really not necessary. The best label we can give ourselves is, as people have said, human. I think the concepts of Christianity and spirituality and general exist way beyond humanity and thus I believe it be restricting to attempt to label such things. The fact that people named the faith of Jesus Christ as ‘Christianity’ is one of the many ways in which men restricted the faith at its core, and humanised the shit out of it.
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