Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Only Mind Worth Having: Thomas Merton and the Child Mind

The Only Mind Worth Having: Thomas Merton and the Child Mind

Gardner, Fiona

Paperback

Religion General ArchaeologyGeneral Psychology

ISBN10: 0718894413
ISBN13: 9780718894412
Publisher: Lutterworth Press
Published: Nov 29 2016
Pages: 242
Weight: 0.73
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
An imaginative engagement with Thomas Merton's view of childhood, suggesting that a rediscovery of the 'child mind' helps to a mature relationship with God.

In The Only Mind Worth Having, Fiona Gardner takes Thomas Merton's belief that the child mind is the only mind worth having and explores it in the context of Jesus' challenging, paradoxical, and enigmatic command to become like small children. She demonstrates how Merton's belief and Jesus' command can be understood as part of contemporary spirituality and spiritual practice. To follow Christ's command requires a great leap of the imagination. Gardner examines what it might mean to make this leap when one is an adult without it becoming sentimental and mawkish, or regressive and pathological. Using both psychological and spiritual insights, and drawing on the experiences of Thomas Merton and others, Gardner suggests that in some mysterious and paradoxical way recovering a sense of childhood spirituality is the path towards spiritual maturity. The move from childhood spirituality to adulthood and on to a spiritual maturity through the child mind is a move from innocence to experience to organised innocence, or from dependence to independence to a state of being in-dependence with God.

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