This is more of the speech by Dr Rowan Williams to the RC Synod of Bishops in Rome, last month...
In his autobiography Thomas Merton describes an experience not long after he had entered the monastery where he was to spend the rest of his life (Elected Silence, p.303). He had contracted 'flu, and was confined to the infirmary for a few days, and, he says, he felt a 'secret joy' at the opportunity this gave him for prayer -- and 'to do everything that I want to do without having to run all over the place answering bells.' (But then) he is forced to recognise that this attitude reveals that 'All my bad habits... had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me: spiritual gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride.' In other words, he is trying to live the Christian life with the emotional equipment of someone still deeply wedded to the search for individual satisfaction.
It is a powerful warning; we have to be very careful not simply to persuade people to apply to God and the life of the spirit all the longings for drama, excitement and self-congratulation that we so often indulge in our daily lives. One writer says: the words of the gospel are addressed to human beings who 'who do not yet exist'. That is to say, responding in a life-giving way to what the gospel requires of us means a transforming of ourself, our feelings and thoughts and imaginings. To be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a person in communion with God and others through Jesus Christ.
Contemplation is an intrinsic element in this transforming process. To learn to look to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction, to learn to scrutinise and to relativise the cravings and fantasies that arise in me -- this is to allow God to be God, to come alive in me. Only as this begins to happen will I be delivered from treating the gifts of God as yet another set of things I may acquire to make me happy, or to dominate other people. I discover how to see other persons and things for what they are in relation to God, not to me. And it is here that true justice as well as true love has its roots.
The human face that Christians want to show to the world is a face marked by such justice and love, and thus a face formed by contemplation, by the disciplines of silence and the detaching of the self from the objects that enslave it and the unexamined instincts that deceive it.
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