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December 2
John of Ruusbroec and Ivan Illich

Light show inside the Kirk on Highland, Denver, 2025.
Today is the Feast Day of John of Ruusbroec, a Dutch priest and mystic, who died on this day in 1381. His writings emphasize the love of God and unity with God.
Today also marks the death, in 2002, of Ivan Illich, Catholic priest and social philosopher who criticized modern Western education and medicine, among other things.
Reflection:
John of Ruusbroec wrote:
“God contemplates Himself and all things in an Eternal Now that has neither beginning nor end.”
and
“God in the depths of us receives God who comes to us: it is God contemplating God.”
Ivan Illich recognized that one of the main perversions of our society is car culture. Our dependence on automobiles and the way we have engineered cities around them have diminished our social and political life. He wrote of the person who is car-dependent:
He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.
He also wrote:
Jesus was an anarchist savior. That's what the Gospels tell us. …He does not question that the devil holds all power, nor that this power has been given to him, nor that he, the devil, gives it to whom he pleases. This is a point which is easily overlooked. By his silence Jesus recognizes power that is established as "devil" and defines Himself as The Powerless. He who cannot accept this view on power cannot look at establishments through the spectacle of the Gospel. This is what clergy and churches often have difficulty doing. They are so strongly motivated by the image of church as a "helping institution" that they are constantly motivated to hold power, share in it or, at least, influence it.
Prayer: God who is inside us and who comes to us, who is both over us and at the core of us — help us transform our ways of being together so that the divine life can be shared by all. Amen.