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The Only Mind Worth Having: Thomas Merton and the Child Mind. By Fiona Gardner. Cambridge, U.K.: The Lutterworth Press, 2016. xiv + 228 pp. $37.50 (paper).
Jesus's words "unless you change and become like children" (Matt. 18:3 NRSV) are the focus of Fiona Gardners book on Thomas Merton's spirituality-his journey to an adult engagement with God. Often shortened to unless you become, Gardner emphasizes the need for imagination, letting go, and vigilant openness to new reality and relationship. Here, child mind resonates with Buddha mind and beginner's mind. The child mind is another way Merton spoke about the true self, a state of spiritual maturity. It is a state where the person can move beyond the self-consciousness of the persona. As explored earlier, the child mind is not a regression to an infantile state of mind, known before the shadow and the disguise obscure it, but rather a state that takes us beyond the shadow and the disguise. It is ending the sense of separateness from God and accepting our being-in-dependency with the Being-"Him in Whom is hidden our original face before we are born" (p. 197).
Gardner, a psychotherapist, spiritual director, and writer, was formerly the chair of the Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland and coeditor of...