A reflection on Psalm 90

Sitting down to organize one's thoughts for a reflection like this made me realize that I am, sadly, more like myself now than I ever was. By which I mean that I am more creative in finding ways to procrastinate than I ever was. And the Internet makes it so easy, providing the illusion of doing research while consuming the clock until bedtime. Because, because when there is work to be done it's nearly always bedtime, or at least naptime, and no reasonable person would require me to continue to meditate on a 2,500- year old gem of wisdom when I'm so sleepy.

"So teach [me] to number my days that [I] may apply [my] heart unto wisdom." That, I'm sure you recognize, is a paraphrase of verse 12 of this evening's Psalm, modified to substitute the first person pronoun for the third person. "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." This would seem to be a scriptural way of discouraging procrastination. And so it is, but only in part. Psalm 90 is a compact reminder that life is short. There are plenty of other such reminders. We think of Thomas Hobbes' bitter observation that, in a violent world, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Or the post Viet-Nam bumper sticker: Life's a bitch, and then you die. The Psalm goes beyond these pithy and nihilistic views. Psalm 90 is by turns uplifting, rueful, clear-eyed, demanding and wise. All that in 17 verses. The Order for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer ends the Psalm at the 12th verse, which is understandable in its context, but in some ways unfortunate because it omits the response of the community to the indisputable brevity of the human lifespan and excludes the Psalmist's description of wisdom.

I marvel at the way the human condition travels across the centuries in the Psalms. If the text of the Psalter is beamed out into space and somehow received and translated by an alien race, they will have the opportunity to know more about the interior life of humankind from the Psalms than they will ever learn from our nightly news broadcasts or our great 19th century novels. All the contradictions, all the pain, all the hope -- the indomitable hope -- present in the human race, is to be found in the Psalms.

Psalm 90 is written in the voice of the entire community, yet it works just as well from the perspective of the individual. It moves, in its compact way, from acknowledgment that God is not bound by time, yet uses time to work his will; to poignant statements of the brevity of human life and its purpose; to a plea for God to instruct us to use our circumscribed time properly; to a demand that our bad times be matched with an equal measure of good times; to a closing entreaty to make himself present to his people.

How insubstantial is man, says the Psalmist. Compared to the mountains, mankind's term is of no more consequence than a single watch in the night. No more enduring than a dream at daybreak. A thousand years in the sight of God is as but a single day. Talk about your dog years! We are as grass, growing and fresh in the dewy morning; dried and withered by nightfall. The Psalmist says "for we consume away in thy displeasure". Or as it is translated elsewhere, "thou turnest man back into dust."

Our years are three score and ten, four score if we are strong. Yet strength yields naught but labor and sorrow, and our days end like "a tale that is told." Not a saga that is told, just a tale, an anecdote, a comment about something that happened while passing through the downtown bus tunnel. One translation I looked at said "our years come to an end like a sigh." Another said "our years die away like a murmur." No wonder people of power and means erect monuments to hold their earthly remains. To be as withered grass? To be as inaccessible to the memory of our contemporaries and posterity as a dream at daybreak? To resist this outcome is natural. Hence the pyramids.

While thinking about the fact that most of us will leave no trace after our death, I was put in mind of the Humboldt River in Nevada. It runs 300 miles from east to west in northern Nevada. You see it from the train, my favorite vantage, or on the north side of Interstate 80 when traveling by car. To make its journey, this river twists and turns to exploit every gap in the jumble of mountains that make up the Nevada topography. You might almost call it plucky, if you wanted to anthropomorphize the struggle and success this river has as it courses from its headwaters spring to its end about 50 miles east of Reno. Yet it ends, not in the noisy, exuberant surf of a river meeting the ocean, but by simply disappearing into the sand of the desert. Its banks cease to define it, it spreads out a little or a lot, depending on the time of year, and sinks out of sight. It leaves no trace of its struggle to get to the end. It just sinks out of sight. Bulrushes and reeds mark its ending place, not pyramids. Most of us will eventually do a Humboldt.

If this were all the Psalmist had to say about our transitory nature, it would be a downer, indeed. But it is not. "So teach us," he says, "to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." This is not about arithmetic sums. We have that already in the three score and ten. The counting the Psalmist has in mind is the counting we do as we take stock of precious things, as we measure our resources against our aspirations, as we compare the finite with the infinite.

And what, suggests the Psalmist is the resource we are measuring, and what is the aspiration? The resource is time, infinite for God, finite for us. The aspiration is to use that finite time to "apply our hearts unto wisdom." One translation has it "to enter the gate of wisdom." Another has it to "get a heart of wisdom." Psalm 90 is an antidote to nihilism.

We know that we must work. "Prosper thou the work of our hands...", says the Psalmist, "prosper our handy-work" We know that there will be repeated hard times and adversity. "Comfort us again after the time that thou hast plagued us." The petition of Psalm 90 is for God to help us use our finite time for more than labor and more than recovery from sorrow. It begs for the wherewithal to use time for a more sublime purpose than these, necessary as they are. It is an appeal for the precious intangible of wisdom. Not the mere accumulation of facts piled higher and higher. Not the wisdom of treasured ancient texts, memorized and recited. The Psalm implores the judicious use of time to attain wisdom, and then spells out what that wisdom looks like. It is the wisdom to acknowledge and be satisfied with the mercy of the Lord. The wisdom to see in everything his glorious and majestic hand, and the comfort of knowing God as our refuge from generation to generation, world without end. Amen.

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