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Four Steps of Love

Author:	Fiona Gardner
Published By:	Darton, Longman and Todd (London)
Pages:	140
Price:	£11.95
ISBN:	978 0 232 52716

Reviewed by Terry Hinks.

In Four Steps of Love, Fiona Gardner explores the spiritual journey as an experience of continuous conversion, “an ongoing process of inner transformation”. Her book has a strong structure based around Bernard of Clairvaux’s Four Steps of Love:

We love ourselves for ourselves

We love God for what he has given us

We love God for himself

We love ourselves for God’s sake.

The writer then links to each step a question that Jesus asked within the Gospels, beginning with the question from John 1.38: “What are you looking for?” The reflections on the steps and the questions that follow draw very consciously on the experience of spiritual writers such as Thomas Merton, Evelyn Underhill and Raissa Maritain. The writer also draws on her own experience as a psychotherapist. Each of the four stages ends with a series of exercises for the reader to use. To do the book justice requires slow reading and time to work through the exercises. Unfortunately the exercises do not seem to encourage the reader to return to the key gospel passages used within the earlier reflections.

This book has many strengths, not least the valuable spiritual exercises and quotations contained within it and its emphasis on conversion as a continuous process which ultimately depends on the grace of God. However its somewhat artificial structure is not altogether successful, dependent as it is on our warming to Bernard of Clairvaux’s framework. Also at times it feels as though the four key biblical passages as subsumed under the more general reflections.