Article March 18, 1996 Issue

Health maintenance in retirement years

Katherine Hildreth

According to statistics, there are more things going wrong with people in my age-group than in any other. So what can we do as the years go by to feel safe, to feel we're being good stewards of our health, maintaining it properly? Does the expectation of unchanging health right through our retirement years seem naive, simply too good to be true?

Not when we acknowledge as demonstrable fact the concept that Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, sets forth in her book Rudimental Divine Science. "Health," she says, "is the consciousness of the unreality of pain and disease; or, rather, the absolute consciousness of harmony and of nothing else" (p. 11).

Recently I've become more mindful than ever of the urgent necessity of making the daily—in fact, hourly—commitment to maintaining harmony and nothing else in thought, never allowing discordant thoughts of any kind to contaminate my thinking. I'm doing this through a deep, heartfelt yearning to live more closely to God, to yield to the spirituality of my true being—to be what God made me to be. God, Spirit, didn't create man as a young image, or a middle-aged image, or an old image. But in His own image (see Gen. 1:27). Hence the real being of you and me and everyone is not fleshly body that inexorably deteriorates into old age. It is a spiritual and ageless idea.