We have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the greatest immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is not one of self-discipline but of self-abnegation. - Audre Lorde
