When we get to heaven, will we be of the same age as when we died or some other age?
St Thomas Aquinas answers that question in his Summa Theologiae. Naturally, he could only speculate about the answer, based on reason and Scripture, but what he says is plausible.
He first quotes St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: “Until we all meet … unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ” (Eph 4:13). From this he concludes: “Now Christ rose again of youthful age, which begins about the age of thirty years, as Augustine says (The City of God, 22). Therefore, others also will rise again of a youthful age” (STh, Suppl. q. 81, art. 1).
St Thomas goes on to justify his conclusion: “Man will rise again without any defect of human nature, because as God founded human nature without a defect, even so will he restore it without defect. Now human nature has a twofold defect.
“First, because it has not yet attained to its ultimate perfection. Secondly, because it has already gone back from its ultimate perfection. The first defect is found in children, the second in the aged: and consequently in each of these, human nature will be brought by the resurrection to the state of its ultimate perfection, which is in the youthful age, at which the movement of growth terminates, and from which the movement of decrease begins” (ibid).
In fact, there is some anecdotal evidence for what St Thomas is saying.
Consider, for example, the case of three-year-old American boy, Colton Burpo, who had a near-death experience of heaven which I related in my book Dying to Live – Reflections on Life After Death (Connor Court 2022, p. 64).
His story was popularised in the book and later the film Heaven is for Real. While undergoing surgery for a burst appendix in 2003, Colton’s soul left his body and went to heaven, where he says he met his great-grandfather, who had died 30 years before Colton was born.
His parents were naturally sceptical about how he could have known someone he had never met, so they showed him a photograph of his great-grandfather taken shortly before his death. Colton said no, that was not the person he saw. Only when they showed him a photo of him as a young man did he recognise him.
Another case concerns Gabrielle, the wife of a friend of mine, who died of a heart attack in January 2014 at the age of 64. In December 2016, Michael, a well-known television journalist friend of her family, was in Mass in Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral when he suddenly saw Gabrielle.
As an investigative journalist, Michael was always sceptical about the truth of anything or anyone he was investigating. He describes what he saw in his book A Sceptic’s Search for Meaning:
“I have now had the most indescribable experience of seeing someone in heaven. I know that is a big statement and one which will be questioned by many. But my belief in the authenticity of this experience is unshakeable… It is an innocuous image of her that I see but, oh, so powerful: her full face, her hair and a hint of the top of her shoulders… I am stunned by how beautiful she is. She was a beautiful young woman when I first met her, but she was in her 60 when she died and her looks, as you’d expect, had changed. But there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is my friend, Gabrielle.
She appears as if she is in her late twenties and her beauty is beyond what I had encountered in life: smiling quietly with a look of contentment and relaxation… I have trouble finding the words because the ones that come to mind, like ‘beautiful’, ‘relaxed’, and ‘serene’, don’t seem sufficient. They are too common and overused. Then the right word comes to me in a jolt: ‘heavenly’.”
Six weeks after Gabrielle appeared to Michael, she appeared to a lawyer from Melbourne who was also a family friend. He said he was lying in bed when “a young and very beautiful woman appeared to me.
“I thought she was aged in her 20s. I could only see her from the shoulders upwards. Her face was beautiful. She was happy, peaceful and heavenly… I only knew Gabrielle when she was about 60 years of age. I did not know what she looked like in her 20, but somehow, I knew it was definitely Gabrielle.”
Admittedly, these are only anecdotes but they do point to the possibility that we will all be young in heaven. We’ll find out when we get there.