The contradictory call to life

Affluence and leisure have created a higher psychic temperature. These have focused us on interpersonal, sexual, artistic, athletic and scientific achievement. In a word, they have focused us on self-expression. In our culture meaningful self-expression is everything; lack of it is death. Yet it is this death that paschally we must enter.—Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten among the Lilies: Learning to Love beyond the Fears, 13