We Count Our Days
Photo by Murray Campbell on Unsplash
Having just turned 90 I have had ample time to ponder old age, growing old, and death. I find that the old age part sneaks up on me. Maybe, as the TV ad has it, “Age is simply a number.” But I think not. It is our best human way of marking our reliance on God’s grace and living it back to God in gratitude as best we can. Jenifer Senior, “The Age in Our Head,” (Atlantic 2023, pp. 14-16) observes that most people think of themselves as twenty years younger than they are. But before she finishes her piece, she concludes:
I was struck by how many people said that their present age was their favorite one. A reassuring number of respondents [to a questionnaire] didn’t want to trade their hard-earned wisdom—or humility, or self-acceptance, whatever they had accrued along the way—for some earlier moment.
While I sometimes wish I were younger, I do not spend any time imagining that I am. In any case, this is a report on my pondering. In case it may interest you or be useful for your own pondering, here is an inventory of biblical texts that have been useful for me as the years have piled up.
We may most beneficially turn to Psalm 90 for our consideration of God’s grace and our gratitude. After God has bid us to “turn back” (v. 3), the Psalmist dares to spin the same imperative back to God: “Turn, O Lord!” (v. 13) The petition is that God should turn away from wrath, anger, or absence to enact compassion and steadfast love. The Psalmist has the freedom and courage to address God in an imperative and to speak back to God the same imperative. It is the sway we may have in our most intimate relationships.
Two familiar phrases draw our attention. In verse 10, the Psalmist voices realism about his life-span:
The days of our life are seventy years,
or perhaps eighty, if we are strong (v. 10).
The Psalmist sees that all around people die at those ages. And while our medical advances have upped that number significantly, the reality of these lines rings true. Life remains short. Bodies give in. We die. There is no escape. But the verse adds even more reality:
Even then their span is only toil and trouble;
they are soon gone, and we fly away (v. 10).
The years we live overflow with endless vexation and work. No matter how much we succeed with wisdom, wealth, or power, human life consists in demands and anxieties. The next verse, moreover, assigns such burdens to the imposition of God. It is for that reason that the Psalmist addresses God, asks God to turn and relieve the pressure that belongs intrinsically to the human condition. Thus the Psalmist knows and tells us that life at its most extended is not and will not be a zone of unqualified wellbeing, even as much as we hope and pray that it might be.
The other most familiar phrase is in verse 12:
So teach us to count our days
that we may gain a wise heart (v. 12).
The word “count” or “number” merits attention. Clearly it does not mean simply to “enumerate” the sequence of days. That would be easy enough. My recent birthday card from the beloved William West and David Ellis reports that my ninety years is 32,850 days; so they are enumerated! (It also reports that it is 47,304,000 minutes!) Something more is required here. The verse means, rather, to slow down, to notice, to savor each day, and so face one’s life with a capacity to see the present reality of life and the coming reality of death in a world well governed by God:
He petitions for a right wisdom about life, an ability to deal with the knowledge of death in such a way—beyond all categories, such as divine wrath or death as punishment for sin—that life can be accepted as a gift from God and lived as something fulfilled. Thus the petitioner asks that knowing about the limitedness of the time allotted to each person may make one aware of the immense value of every single day (“teach us to count our days!”), the now given one at each and every moment. In light of the knowledge of death, what is important, in the view of this petition, is to receive every individual instant, in astonishment, as a gift of a good creator God and to withstand the challenge of it (Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Erich Zenger, Psalms 2: A Commentary on Psalms 51-100, 2005, 413).
The outcome of such intentionality may be a “wise heart.”
The “wise heart” makes possible a view of the world that is realistic and affirmative of reality—even that of death. If “wisdom” means the art of living, then the ability here asked of God…to say yes to life and to live that yes (in the midst of many things that deserve a no) is Wisdom’s art of living par excellence (ibid. 432).
The Psalmist has no yearning to wish death away, but intends to face it honestly, and so to see his life whole from beginning to end as a project in which the rule of God is powerfully at work. There is here no escapism and no romanticism, but the honest work of seeing one’s life as it is in the context of God’s governance. It is an act of theological realism.
But lest in my pondering of my life-span I be drawn too simplistically into the sphere of God’s unmistakable governance, here are two other texts that sound a very different kind of realism. These are texts we do not often notice, but I have found that they merit our attention. The first of these texts is in Leviticus 27:1-7. (The remainder of this odd chapter concerns the price of an animal for sacrifice and the price of land.) These verses concern the monetary value of a human life (one’s own or the life of one’s child) offered to the service of God. The establishing of the monetary value of a human life evidences sober realism. It recognizes that a very young child or a very old person is of less value (and so a lower equivalence), because such persons cannot perform the required work so well. Thus the table of equivalences goes like this:
Age Male Female
20 to 60 years 50 shekels 30 shekels
5 to 20 years 20 shekels 10 shekels
Over 60 years 15 shekels 10 shekels
1 month to 5 years 5 shekels 5 shekels
(See Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., “The Book of Leviticus,” NIB, p.1187).
We are able to see the realism that old age lessens one’s value because the potential for productive work diminishes. Thus it is a law of the marketplace that age diminishes monetary value. And certainly every aging person knows about the waning of energy and the loss of productive capacity. In this text we are clearly in a universe quite remote from the theological reality of Psalm 90. Now we deal with the recognition that the human person is homo economicus, a reality to be faced as we quibble about investment in the maintenance and support for us old people (Social Security and Medicare).
That honest recognition of the waning capacity of old age is articulated as well in the realism of Ecclesiastes 12:1-8. The teacher bids us to be glad in youth that is referred to the creator God. That wondrous season of youth is then contrasted with the disabilities that come with aging. Again, this is a voice of realism about physical loss that variously comes with old age. The words are these:
In the day when the guards of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the women who grind cease working because they are few, and those who look through the windows see dimly; when the doors on the street are shut, and the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low; when one is afraid of heights, and terrors are in the road; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails; because all must go to their eternal home, and the mourners will go about the streets (Ecclesiastes 12:3-5).
These images are easily taken as reference to failing body parts:
keeper of the house; arm;
strong men bent; legs;
grinders; teeth;
windows; eyes;
doors; ears;
sound of grinding; voice;
almond tree blossoms; gray hair; and
grasshopper drags along; difficulty walking
(See Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament 1974, 123).
These verses have all body parts in purview. And for all our modern learning about health and self-care, these matters have not changed. Body parts wear out. You cannot fool your body (nephesh)! This sober recognition resonates with the script of monetary value in Leviticus 27. In old age we are diminished. Our value in a market economy subsides. For all our resolve and care, it comes upon us, until the ultimate reach of bodily diminishment, death!
The inventory of Ecclesiastes 12 is tersely echoed in the Fourth Gospel:
Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go (John 21:18).
In youth one has freedom and mobility. In old age, by contrast, one requires a minder who dresses you and takes you where you do not want to be. The image suggests old people who want only to be “at home,” but are sometimes against their will institutionalized for “better care.” To be sure, the Fourth Gospel usage of this imagery has no interest in the diminishment of old age. Rather, the verse is on its way to verse 19, wherein suffering for the gospel leads to the loss of agency as the hostile empire imposes its will upon the faithful. It is unmistakable that the “follow me” by Jesus in this verse is the most dangerous imperative we will ever hear.
The juxtaposition of these texts is telling. On the one hand, “seventy or perhaps eighty years with trouble,” and “count our days”; on the other hand, waning monetary value and bodily dysfunction. The texts converge in their testimony to our mortality and with a poignant reference to God who, unlike us, is “Immortal, Invisible, God only wise.” Thus in Ecclesiastes, the “breath” (ruah) returns to God who gave it (12:7). While the sacrificial system of Leviticus 27 may assert equivalences for human persons, in the end the human person can have no monetary equivalence, no monetary value, but only reliance on the “favor of the Lord our God” (Psalm 90:17). (Efforts at monetary equivalence for human persons are evident in the inventories of Ezekiel 27:13 and Revelation 18:14 that easily arrive at a sale price for slaves. Just as we have done in our own slave economy in the US.)
Finally I thought of two other texts that push the boundary of aging to its extreme. The words of Hosea are familiar to us only because Paul quotes them:
Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol?
Shall I redeem them from Death?
O Death, where are your plagues?
O Sheol, where is your destruction?
Compassion is hidden from my eyes (Hosea 13:14).
The intent of Hosea is very different from that of Paul in his quote of these lines. In the prophet God asks two rhetorical questions that require negative answers:
No, I will not ransom them from the power of Sheol.
No, I will not redeem them from the God of Death (Mot).
The two vocatives, “O Death (Mot), O Sheol” are summons to these negative powers (that are answerable to God) to work their worst. The poet finds divine compassion hidden and elusive. This is a very hard saying, that God will mobilize the powers of Death against recalcitrant Ephraim. Death is at the beck and call of God! The only possible good news here is that Death is not an autonomous agent, but is subject to the governance of God.
A Christian, however, does not read these lines in Hosea apart from their quote in I Corinthians wherein Paul celebrates the victory God has won over Mot in the resurrection of Jesus:
For this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
Death has been swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who
gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 15:54-57).
God has declared war on Mot. Mot has no victory. Mot has no sting. Because the God life has prevailed. The reality of “seventy or eighty years,” the need to “count our days,” the diminished capacity of the old, and the helplessness of the old are not denied. All of that is right before our eyes. It is, however, all put in context, and context alters everything. It turns out, in the proclamation of Paul, that death amounts to no substantive defeat for the purposes of God. There is no need for denial. The “perishable body” is marked by weakness. But that weakness is not the final truth of our life.
Finally, to return to Psalm 90. In verse 3, human persons are addressed as “mortals” (‘nosh). The poet utilizes the term for humanity in its weakness, not ‘adam, humanity in its strength! These verses put humanity in proper perspective before the reality of God:
You turn us back to dust,
and say, “Turn back, you mortals.”
For a thousand years in your sight
are like yesterday when it is past,
or like a watch in the night.
You sweep them away; 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 (Psalm 90:3-6).
Or as Watts’s hymn has it:
A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun (Glory to God, 687).
Our humanity is ultimately transitory, like the flash of a light, like the flick of a switch, gone in an instant. We are like a dream…or a nightmare. We are like grass, only for a season, dependent on water and sun, and then dried up, cut down, forgotten. The Psalm does not flinch from its truth-telling. In our frail short-term existence, we dwell amid the God who neither slumbers nor sleeps, who remembers and does not forget. Our finiteness remains our ongoing enigma. We juxtapose what we know of our bodily reality with what we know and trust of the fidelity of God. There is no settling between the two, because both are the reality of our life.
All of this I was pondering in the run-up to my 90th birthday. And then I celebrated. I had a large company of friends who celebrated with me. The celebration filled me with exultant gratitude. On that day I did not think much of my frail reality. But it was there as a truth of my life. As I have numbered my days, every one of them is filled with gratitude for a measure of good health, for a measure of meaningful work that persists, and for the immeasurable blessing of generous folk all around who bless me daily.
The day after my birthday, with Tia I watched a part of the Oscar awards on March 12. The movies celebrated on that night are variously equipped to be truth-telling about the human condition. That truth-telling is honest. On that night, however, not much of the truth-telling was in evidence. The evening featured handsome offers of beautiful human flesh, all with strutting and preening splendor. No hurt, no tears except tears of elation, no violence except filmed violence, no defect, no failure. All was well. In the wake of my 90th birthday, I wondered if this award ceremony was a pageant of denial, and that done by those who are so capable of presenting reality to us. Maybe there was some denial, because the beautiful people can do that for a season. My guess is that for the most part, they knew better. And for a moment—not unlike the moment of my birthday—they screened out the force of death for the sake of celebration and affirmation. We do that. We do that for each other, and for ourselves. No problem with such screening out as long as it is only a momentary yearning. As long as we know better. As long as we recognize our dream-like, grass-like morality. The beauty industry, the health industry, and the money industry all collude to imagine that we can be masters of our own fate. But we know better. That is why we count our days. That is why we know that our days have a finite number. That is why we know that every day is a gift; and we may count it and make it count. But we pause in our counting and in our making count, for the sake of sober reality. In that pause we may turn our attention away from our frailty to the God of all compassion. It is to this God that we voice our petition that God may let the work of our hands count for something:
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and prosper for us the work of our hands—
O prosper the work of our hands! (Psalm 90:17).
Walter Brueggemann
March 16, 2023
