Williams: Contemplation, in other words, is a deeper appropriation of the vulnerability of the self in the midst of the language and transactions of the world

Contemplation, in other words, is a deeper appropriation of the vulnerability of the self in the midst of the language and transactions of the world; it identifies the real damaging pathologies of human life, our violent obsessions with privilege, control, and achievement, as arising from the refusal to know and love oneself a creature, a body … The hope professed by Christians of immortal life cannot be a hope for a non-mortal way of seeing the world; it is rather a trust that what our mortality teaches us of God opens up the possibility of knowing God or seeing God in ways for which we have, by definition, no useful mortal words.

• Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (1999)