Psalm 90

"Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

Psalm 90 is one of my favorite Psalms. I'm a very existential person and I think about death a lot. I've jokingly referred to my first three books--Unclean, The Authenticity of Faith, and The Slavery of Death--as my Death Trilogy. (Readers be warned, these books were written for scholarly, academic audiences before my books turned to popular, general audiences.) Existential topics and the predicament of death is a dominant theme in my Death Trilogy, most obviously so in The Slavery of Death where I bring existential psychology into conversation with Eastern Orthodox theology in naming death, rather than sin, as the central human predicament.

Given my preoccupation with death, my fondness for Psalm 90 shouldn't be surprising. Psalm 90 is a meditation upon the brevity of life:

You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of man!”
For a thousand years in your sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
or as a watch in the night.

You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning:
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
in the evening it fades and withers.

For we are brought to an end by your anger;
by your wrath we are dismayed.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.

For all our days pass away under your wrath;
we bring our years to an end like a sigh.
The years of our life are seventy,
or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Returning to dust we are soon gone and fly away.

If you're not existentially inclined you might read such lines and think, "Goodness, who could enjoy such morbid reflections?" For myself, I wouldn't say I "enjoy" such reflections. What I experience in Psalm 90 is a deepening sense of poignant preciousness. That's the best I can describe it. Each breath and heartbeat intensifies in profundity and significance. Time slows for me and I sink into the moment. I become alert to time and that wakefulness makes me want to savor its passing and live with keener attention. In this attentive posture time cannot slip by me, for I am alive, alert, attentive, and aware. My heart becomes a net in which moments are caught.

This is what I believe Psalm 90 means by "numbering our days." Attend to each day in its finite and fleeting particularity. Such attention to time creates "a heart of wisdom." I think this is what Ecclesiastes means when it says:

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.

Or, as the NLT renders it:

Better to spend your time at funerals than at parties. After all, everyone dies—so the living should take this to heart.

I'll confess, I'd rather walk a cemetery than go to a party. I'm weird that way. And while I don't know if this tendency of mine has made me any wiser, it has allowed me to live at a spiritual depth of perception that has made me treasure every season, year, day, and second of my life.

No day passes that I do not notice and number.