A piece of bread, a matress and a candle wick

Currently I am reading through Ivan Illich's "The Rivers North of the Future". It is a quasi-biographical work with an emphasis on the nature of Illich's activism and thought. In the first chapter Illich relates the story of an Asain pilgrim, just prior to the second world war, who after conversion decides to hold a pilgrimage to Rome. Throughout the east he is let into every house he comes to, and the locals show him hospitality, after he explains he is on a religious pilgrimage. He was given food, a handout and shelter. In fact, it does not matter that it is even a specifically Christian pilgrimage, they let him in anyway once they found out he was going to a sacred place.
As he comes closer to Rome he arrives in Eastern Orthodox territory and something changes. Instead of going to a strangers house the parishioners pointed him to the Parish house, a place designed for guests and visitors. This is a big difference; an act of hospitality starts to have a form institutionalization. Instead of being able to allow guests into their home the Christians in those land organized themselves in such a way that they built a house for the stranger.
This trend became stronger when he arrived in Catholic Poland. Here people put him up in a hotel. It moved from a choice of the villagers in Asia, to a parish culture of support in Orthodox lands to a fully developed form of a hospitality industry in western europe (that is; the parts of Europe that grew underneath the influence of Catholic Christianity). Illich criticizes this entire trend by explaining how "a gratuitous and truly free choice had become an ideology and an idealism".
According the Illich this developed around the time when (a) Christianity was becoming a dominant force in the Roman Empire and (b) the Empire was collapsing. With the social upheaval at the time the emperors began legislating strict rules in relation to homelessness. In order to deal with homeless refugees the empire gave major financial support to Churches who were already showing hospitality to these people. Thus, in order to deal with the huge influx of money and privelege, the churches institutionalized hospitality.
This is what Illich calls "the perversion of the best is the worst".
At this point Illich seems to be completely lost. We have a socialist government which runs our electricity companies, gives us education for thirteen years, helps fund post-secondary education, funds our health care and medicare,helps set up pensions, finances the disabled, builds our roads and funds social workers who work with homeless and poor with programs such as homeless shelters and soup kitchens, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THAT? Aren't all these things intrinsically good? Yes, yes: bureaucracy sucks sometimes being inefficient and wasteful. Yes, it is not perfect. Nothing is. What right does he have to call it "the worst".
Following his discussion about what has happened to hospitality he turns his attention to one of the earliest historical record of Christianity. Outside of an old brothel in Rome there is picture of a man on a cross with the horse of a donkey. Underneath the words "Anaxemenos adores his God". One of the oldest records of of Christianity is some who mocked a person for worshipping a crucified God. How foolish!
It is this sense of foolishness which is lost in Christianity, at least western Christianity, according to Illich. The Good Samaritan parable in Luke is what Illich based his analysis on. According to him "the way of the Samaritan is - pure folly if you really think it through". It is pure folly which is the ultimate duty and can not be normalized in institutions as it has been without being perverted from the ethical duty of the individual.
Illich goes on too talk about the first two generations of Christianity. With the first two generations each Christian community had a prophet, as can be seen in the New Testament records. Yet no longer where they prophets awaiting the coming of the messiah, for he had already come, nor were they bringing the word of God to the people because the word had already come through Jesus. So what did they do? They warned about the antichrist. The antichrist, a mysterious figure, was somehow meant to emerge from the church itself.
For Illich the idea of the anti-Christ is a type of evil opened up only through the revelation of Christ. In a sense that it is a thing which directly contradicts what Christ means. Christ, for Illich, opens up the opportunity to see the potential of others to be redeemed. Sin is the denial of this dignity that Others can have through Christ. It is something completely new. This seems to be an aside, but is utterly important for what Illich is discussing. For this type of treatment, treating people as those who can be redeemed, is "radical foolishness". This freedom of being loyal to someone as if to be loyal to God is the heart of the matter. For Illich "the idea that by not responding to you, when you call upon my fidelity, I thereby personally offend God is fundamental to understanding what Christianity is about."
Christianity then opens up a new possibility. The possibility is that "[we] can encounter God in Chris and Christ in the unknown one who knocked at his door and asked for hospitality." Now this is what Illich means when he says "the best". By "the worst" he means a situation where it is thought that"charitable institutions can do much better than a bunch of individual Christians". That is the central perversion. The loss of the original purity of the gospel. The cause of all the stress, all the corruption and all the evil coming out our western bureacracies today comes from this way of using the gospel.