LOST ICONS: REFLECTIONS ON CULTURAL BEREAVEMENT
by Rowan Williams
I wrote earlier of two moments that offer a heightening of truthful self-consciousness. I am stirred into facing what I am as a voice and an agency in time when I encounter what frustrates my unexamined desire, and I can to some extent discover this by discipline, by the classic disciplines of asceticism, certainly-fasting, the contemplative refusal of images, the challenge of hopes for sexual gratification- but also by certain aspects of that odd and ambivalent modern ascesis, the analytic process. ...