NONFICTION - June 23, 1991

THE UNSEEN SHORE: Memories of a Christian Science Childhood by Thomas Simmons (Beacon Press: 173 pp.; $17.95). The more secular-minded among us may have trouble understanding how Thomas Simmons’ mood could shift so abruptly from exuberance at “the unsullied sand” of an ocean park to despair simply because he sees a naked man jogging across the beach. The struggle to see beauty in the man as well as the landscape would seem a simple matter of getting hip. For Simmons, however, it involves renouncing his faith-- the Christian Science view that man is divine and the material world unreal--and thus accepting the painful reality of change, loss and mortality.

Simmons remained in the church until only recently, even though its teachings blatantly contradicted his perceptions, because it acted as a balm against change. “The unity of God, father, mother and family,” he writes, “somehow evolved into an assurance that nothing would ever be radically different from the normal and comfortable state into which I was born.” In writing, though, he discovers a new balm, one enabling him to accept change rather than anesthetizing him against it. We witness his fear as he confronts the blank page, “setting out a route through emptiness.” But we also share his satisfaction as he learns to “watch my own past shift and change as I write it . . . to see God as a fluid and changing form of love and mind, rather than an absolute or constant.”