John Ruysbroeck was a Flemish mystical writer who greatly influenced mystical teaching in the late Middle Ages and whose name is associated with the religious renewal in the Lowlands that also producedThe Imitation of Christ. He was born near Brussels in 1293 and was raised by a devout mother who trained him in a life of holiness. At the age of eleven, he went to Brussels to live with an uncle, John Hinckaert, a priest and canon of St. Gudule's. John Ruysbroeck studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1317. Under his uncle's roof he continued to live a life of retirement and study and began the writings that were to be the basis of his spiritual teaching: The Spiritual Espousals, The Kingdom of Lovers, and The Tabernacle.
Together with his uncle and another canon, Francis van Coudenberg, Blessed John Ruysbroeck withdrew to a hermitage near Soignes for a life of greater solitude, and a number of disciples joined them. They decided to inaugurate a formal religious institute and adopted the rule of the canons of St. Victor. John was made the prior of the new institute.
Excellent writings continued to come forth from his pen: The Book of the Sparkling Stone, The Little Book of Enlightenment, and The Book of the Twelve Beguines. John Ruysbroeck's writings are considered classics of spirituality, anticipating the writings of St. John of the Cross in their clarity and doctrine. He strongly opposed the quietist tendencies of many of his contemporaries. His solid theological background and his ability to make clear the sure path of spiritual progress gave him a wide reading, and his books are lucid commentaries on the Augustinian doctrine of the life of grace.
For several years before his death, John lived in a small cell, just outside the cloister of his monastery. In his eighty-eighth year, he asked to be taken to the community infirmary, where he prepared himself for death. He died on December 2,1381. He was beatified by Pope Pius X in 1908.
I hope you will put up with me in a little foolishness. Yes, please put up with me! I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.
Writings
(Year A). You must accept that the Persons [of the Trinity] yield and lose themselves whirling in essential love, that is, in enjoyable unity; nevertheless, they always remain according to their personal properties in the working of the Trinity. You may thus understand that the divine nature is eternally active according to the mode of the Persons and eternally at rest and without mode according to the simplicity of its essence. It is why all that God has chosen and enfolded with eternal personal love, he has possessed essentially, enjoyably in unity, with essential love. For the divine Persons embrace mutually in eternal complacency with an infinite and active love in unity. This activity is constantly renewed in the living life of the Trinity. There is continuously new birth-giving in new knowledge, new complacency, and new breathing forth of the Spirit in a new embrace with a new torrent of eternal love. All the elect, angels, and men from the last to the first, are embraced in this complacency. It is in this complacency that Heaven and Earth are suspended, existence, life, activity, and maintenance of all creatures, save only the aversion from God through sin which comes from the creatures’ own blind perversity.
And out of the complacency of God flow grace and glory and all the gifts in Heaven and on Earth and in each individually according to his need and to his receptivity. For the grace of God is prepared for all men and awaits the return of every sinner. When he, by means of the touch of grace, decides to take pity on himself and trustfully call on God, he always finds pardon. So whosoever, by means of grace with loving complacency, is brought back to the eternal complacency of God will be caught and embraced in the fathomless love which is God himself, and he is forever renewed in love and virtue. For while we please God and God pleases us, then love is practiced and eternal life. But God has loved us eternally and has cherished us in his complacency and we should consider that rightly, and thus our love and complacency should be renewed, for through the relations between the Persons in the divinity there is always new complacency with new out-flowing of love in a new embrace in unity.
And this is without time, that is to say, without before or after in an eternal present, for in the embrace in unity all things have been consummated. And in the out-flowing of love all things are being achieved. And in the living fruitful nature of all things have the potentiality to occur, for in the living fruitful nature the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son, and the Holy Spirit in them both. For it is a living and fruitful unity which is the source and the fount of all life and all genesis. And for this reason all creatures are there without themselves the bursting-out of the Persons with distinction, so the Son is from the Father and the Holy Spirit from them both. There God has created and ordered all creatures in their own essence. And he has remade man by his grace and by his death, so far as it lies in his power. He has adorned his own with love and with virtues and brought them back with him to their beginning. There, the Father with the Son and all the beloved are enfolded and embraced in the bond of love, that is to say, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
It is this same unity which is fruitful according to the bursting-out of the Persons and in the return, an eternal bond of love which can nevermore be untied. And all those who know themselves to be bound therein must remain eternally blissful. They are all rich in virtues and enlightened in contemplation and simple where they rest enjoyably, for in their turning-in, the love of God reveals itself as flowing out with all good and drawing in into unity and as super-essential and without mode in an eternal repose. And so they are united to God, by intermediary, without intermediary, and also without difference.
They have the love of God before them in their inward vision as a common good that flows out in heaven and earth, and they feel the Holy Trinity inclined towards them and within them with plentitude (abundance) of grace, and for this reason they are adorned with all virtues and with good works without and within. Thus they are united with God by means of the intermediary (link) of divine grace producing a holy life. And because they have given themselves to God, whether in action or in abstention or in endurance, they always have peace and inner gladness, solace and savor, which the world cannot receive nor any hypocritical creature, nor any man who seeks himself and has himself in mind more than the honor of God.
Secondly, these same interior, enlightened persons have the love of God before them in their inward vision whenever they want, as drawing or calling in towards unity. For they see and feel that the Father with the Son by means of the Holy Spirit stand embraced with all the elect and are brought back with eternal love into the unity of their nature. This unity is constantly drawing or calling in all that has been born out of it naturally or by grace. And therefore these enlightened people are lifted up with free mind above reason to a bare vision devoid of images (the imageless place of spirit vision). There lives the eternal invitation of God’s unity, and with imageless naked understanding they go beyond all works and all practices and all things to the summit of their spirit. There their naked understanding is penetrated with eternal clarity as the air is penetrated by the light of the sun. The bare elevated will is transformed and penetrated with fathomless love just as iron is penetrated by the fire. And the bare elevated memory finds itself caught and established in a fathomless absence of images.
Thus the created image is united threefoldwise above reason to its eternal image, which is the source of its being and of its life. This source is essentially conserved and possessed in unity with simple contemplation in imageless emptiness. Thus one is raised above the reason, threefold in unity and one in Trinity. Nevertheless, the creature does not become God. And for this reason the creature experiences distinction between itself and God in its inward vision. And though the union is without intermediary, the manifold works that God does in heaven and earth are, however, hidden from the spirit. For though God gives Himself as He is with a clear distinction, He gives Himself in the soul’s essence, where the soul’s powers are unified above reason and undergo God’s transformation in simplicity. In this place all is full and overflowing, for the spirit feels itself as one truth and one richness and one unity with God. Nevertheless there is still an essential forward inclination and that is an essential distinction between the essence of the soul and the essence of God; and that is the highest distinction that can be felt. (Little Book of Enlightenment)
Musical Selection(John Michael Talbot)
Let us kiss with the touch of our lives
Call me Lord to you chamber
For your kiss is an excellent wine flowing smoothly poured out for a lover.
For a bride belongs to her lover
And a Bridegroom yearns for His Bride
So come to the night there to empty our lives
To be fulfilled with the flowers of dawn.
Let us go to the Vineyard my love to see if the vines are in bloom
If the vines have opened to blossom new life, so I will open to you.
As the flowers send forth their fragrant perfume
So the doors of my love shall be open
For I have stored up my treasure for you and now I give you my love.
For a bride belongs to her lover
And a Bridegroom yearns for His Bride
So come to the night there to empty our lives
To be fulfilled with the flowers of dawn.
So come to the night there to empty our lives
To be fulfilled with the flowers of dawn.
Collect [trad.]
O God, Who didst vouchsafe to adorn Blessed John, Thy confessor,
with sublime holiness of life and with heavenly gifts,
grant us, through his merits, and after his example,
