Perfect consumers

[A]s creatures caught in the cycles of elation and bondage we are perfect consumers: that is, creatures who will pay anything to be constantly elated … And thus we only very painstakingly and very slowly and very deliberately begin to see how discipline and freedom are — in a marriage, in a religious vocation — at once the conditions for and the consequences of love: and how correspondingly ecstasy and bondage stem from hate (of self or other) and despair.

Donald Sheehan, The Shield of Psalmic Prayer