Lord, let me know my end
and what is the measure of my days;
let me know how fleeting my life is.
~Psalm 39:4
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| A Statue of Buddha from Bacalhôa Buddha Eden, Lisbon, Portugal Courtesy of Atlas Obscura |
In my living room there is a small plak with a black sky above and a tentative sunrise or sunset over a black silhouette of mountains at the bottom. On it are the words:
The problem is, you think you have time. ~Buddha
This is not actually a quote from "the awakened one," the wandering sage who lived something like 2500 years ago. It is a quote from one of his contemporary students, Jack Kornfield, who wrote "Buddha's Little Instruction Book" (1994), his distillation of the master's teachings for modern readers. This particular quote does represent a theme that can be found more than once in the Buddha's teachings. It may be a summary of this one:
Time. Time is a central concern of the wise, and of those who are advising others to find wisdom. We find the same theme in the Psalm appointed for the first half of this week. Psalm 39 begins with three verses of the psalmist trying not to speak--they don't want to sin with their tongue! But by the end of the third verse, they are positively burning from the effort of keeping silent, so finally, they come out with it, the prayer that has set their heart on fire: they want to know how long they will live.
Why does the psalmist want to know how long they've got? Maybe it has to do with something they want to do, something specfic--such as becoming a wise person. Maybe they want to know how much time they have left to spend with those they love. Maybe they fear an overly extended life--a long, slow descent into feebleness or dementia. Or, maybe they fear an untimely, early demise, with much left undone.
(True confession. This whole conversation makes me think of my attic. *shudders*)
In any or all of these cases, the Psalmist in search of wisdom feels that knowing the span of their days will help them.
Perhaps they will not put off until tomorrow what they must do today.
Perhaps they will learn wisdom with a greater urgency, and fill their heart with, not just knowledge, but the ability to use that knowledge for good, for others as well as themselves.
Perhaps they will spend the hours, days, or years they have before them in doing mercy, living justly, and walking humbly with their God.
But there is also a risk that knowing the number of their days will bring them to a standstill, a kind of spiritual paralysis, in which they are filled with anxiety or fear of that unknown last journey.
This prayer of the psalmist is a puzzle. There are, of course, times in our lives when we may know with some degree certainty how short our time will be. But even then, God surprises us. We outlive the prognosis, we beat the medically determined odds.
I think the psalmist doesn't actually want a text from God with "one week" or "five hundred-twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes" on it. I think the psalmist wants to live their days in wisdom, but also in peace. I think the psalmist wants the tiniest taste of God's wisdom so that their days--however many there may be--are lived in precisely the way God wants them to be lived, whatever that may mean.
God, let us know, not the measure of our days, but how you want us to live.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
Breath prayer: Living.... with You.
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