Old age isn't what it used to be. During most of history only one person in ten ever became sixty-five or older. But in the United States today, eight in ten people pass this milestone, and some predict that by the year 2050 as many as one million Americans will be centenarians.

This "senior boom" is more than a statistical phenomenon. It marks a revolution in the way we think about aging — and living. Not only is longevity increasing; our capacity to be active and useful in every decade of our lives is expanding. According to social psychologist Bernice Neugarten, we're living in an "age-irrelevant society," in which "age has lost its meaning as a predictor of stamina and psychological health" (quoted in Newsweek, March 5, 1990).

If, in fact, a person's age is becoming irrelevant to a successful, productive life, what does that say about the nature of life itself? In the quest for more life, is geriatrics actually mankind's best hope?

Christians have for much of this century acquiesced in the view that probably some expert knew much more than they about how to make their lives healthy and fulfilling. But the time is here for looking askance at that presumption. The significance of Christ Jesus' message isn't confined to a Sunday morning time slot. It has a practical bearing on Mondays as well as Sundays, on the time of fourscore and ten as well as on one's teens and twenties. Jesus' teachings must embrace the whole of our lives. The fact is they uproot deeply entrenched materialistic convictions about the very nature of life and break down the impression of living in a framework delimited by years. The Master taught that the true measure of a person's life is not the passing of time but the understanding and living of God's truth. This truth, the Bible tells us, is that man is created in the image and likeness of Spirit, of divine Love. In other words, what we are supposed to be learning is that man is right now, in utterly practical terms, spiritual and immortal.

Intuitively each of us resists classification by a material count of years. We sense that it makes no sense to think of Artur Rubinstein, playing the piano divinely at ninety, as an "elderly man." Nor does the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, fit any such category when she launches an international daily newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, in her eighty-eighth year. What comes through both examples is not so much an impressively long life as the affirmation that what we know to be the essence of life is always going to be unlimited by age.

We need an uprising in thought in regard to age classifications—a revolution—and it is beginning. But impelling it will be fresh convictions about the true nature of life as spiritual and not material.

According to the Science of Christianity, increased life isn't the eking out of another day in matter. More life comes from our daily demonstrations of the truth of God's man. "Being is holiness, harmony, immortality," Mrs. Eddy writes in the textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. "It is already proved that a knowledge of this, even in small degree, will uplift the physical and moral standard of mortals, will increase longevity, will purify and elevate character. Thus progress will finally destroy all error, and bring immortality to light."

Following Jesus' example doesn't mean just having good morals. It means healing so-called age limitations. It means we're too busy growing wise in the truth of spiritual being to grow old.