"Teach us how to count our days"

The exegetes classify Psalm 89 as a collective petition of forgiveness from God in the temple. Convoked by a penitential liturgy, the people abandon themselves to a heartfelt, public lamentation because of the long chain of trials they undergo. It is a favourable occasion to pour them out and to exercise a "sweet violence" in the heart of God, "Come back, Jahweh! How long must we wait? Take pity on your servants. … let our joy be as long as the time that you afflicted us, the years when we experienced disaster" (v,13). In this supplication, let us note the recurring verbs in the imperative mood, mainly in the third part (vv. 12-17): "teach us, come back, take pity, fill us, let our joy be",

Moreover, the whole Psalm resounds with "we" and "our", expressing an admirable solidarity, which binds inseparably all who are present in the penitential liturgy and even those who are absent, just as if all of them were one single man. The solidarity lived by the people of God is almost organic, in the sense that the individual person is to the people as a member is to the living body. All is shared by all: victory and defeat, glories and humiliations, the anguish of miseries and the craving for freedom.

After the comprehensible pouring out, the people go on through general considerations of sapiential nature on the human destiny. 1. The two heroes of history: God and man, undergo a dense confrontation. God is! God lives in time and outside time. There is no before and no after for him, no yesterday and no tomorrow,  no past and no future, but only the eternal present, "from eternity to eternity you are God!" (2). Only the "today" and the "now" are "his time". He overcomes and transcends the river of time, which runs this side, without being minimally brushed. Rather, at His beckon that time began to beat its own rhythms. He alone existed before the time: there was nothing around him. Thanks to His Word, the space began to be peopled and the days, the years, the centuries started their running. "The universe is His immense cathedral",  Paul VI stated. God is "from ever and ever" (2).

On the contrary, man is marked by finitude, by temporines and caducity. His existence is under the sign of brevity. Everything in him and around him passes away inexorably; everything escapes without leaving anything behind; everything is a flowing at dizzying rhythms. The daily experience confirms, that every temporal reality is subjected to the triple law of stress, oblivion and death. "Everything slips away from the fingers of man", Larranaga writes, "everything flees away with a ceaseless escape, like the birds which fly towards far off lands, like the winds which blow trough our region, like the boats which sail the seas,  like the clouds taken away by the wind, like the smoke which disappears, like the running-away shadows" 2.  The images, which recur in the Psalm on the faintness of man, are impressive and very efficacious: 

"A thousand years are to you
like yesterday which has passed,
like a watch of the night.
in the morning it is blossoming and growing,
by evening it is withered and dry", (vv. 4 and 6).

It is well known that the biblical wisdom grasps every occasion to put man before the sense of limit, of the relativity  of everything, before the ephemeral condition of his existence. Man's life on earth is ebel -the biblical Qohelet states- namely, it is smoke, shadow, a breath, a light mist, vapour, vanity … (Qo 1,2,14; 2, 17; 3,20 … ), it is something evanescent, impalpable, like an unseizable breath 3:

"A human being, fleeting as shadow, transient;
my existence is nothing before you (Jb 14, 1);
like a flower, such a one blossoms and withers. (Jb 14. 2)

Moreover: the caducity of the human existence is made strongly critical by the bitter reality od sin. It is just because of this, that the life of man is shortened further, " We are dismayed by your anger", the penitent people declare in the presence of God. "You have taken note of our guilty deeds, our secrets in the full light of your presence" (vv, 7-8).

Sin is the most eloquent proof of our radical weakness, which branches off in the deepest depth of our being 4.

Sin is the antigod; it is a rebellion which carries with itself a fearful interior division, an intimate laceration between a tension to good and the concrete choice of evil; it is the bitter experience of every sinner, in the sense that he finds himself disarranged in a foolish self-lesion. It is just so! In fact, sin is never only a doing evil, but also inevitably a  doing evil to oneself, a causing a tragic interior division in oneself.

Therefore, man, before the precariousness of existence and the frequent deviations from  the "high road", is solicited to open his eyes and his "heart" on the reality of his days so as he may learn a precious lessons, "Teach us to count the days that are ours, and we shall come to the heart of wisdom" (v. 12). Yes, "man must learn to appreciate the short time given to him, and to live it wisely. Time is short, and it would be foolish to take the trouble of filling it with illusory things. Do exploit the time, enjoy it also, but always with a wise heart" 5.

The author of Psalm 39 is in deep syntony with this wise appreciation of life. Challenged by the terrible and shaking trials of life, the Psalmist firmly proposes to himself a diligent control of his tongue, to avoid proffering foolish words. However, the moment arrives in which the trial becomes so heavy and upsetting as it becomes impossible for him to bear it silently;  swept away by desolation, he forwards  to the Lord the reality of his situation: the vanity of whatever surrounds him along with the inconsistency of his existence, imploring the wisdom of duly minding the shortness of life:

"Look, you have given me but a hand's breadth or two of life.
the length of my life is as nothing to you.
Every human being that stands on earth
is a mere puff of wind …
So now, Lord, what am I to wait for?
My hope is in you" (Psalm 39, 5-8).

"….and we shall reach the heart of wisdom".

What does precisely mean the heart of wisdom ? Which way or concrete exercise of life can attain it? Which direction are we to take in other to find its secret source?

The Psalmists, masters of life and prayer, offer us precise and true indications, deprived of illusions and deceit.  The wisdom teaches me "to measure my life",  "to count my days", which "are almost all fatigue and sorrow and pass away quickly … ". The wisdom of the heart makes us evaluate the shortness of life.

The lifetime is, in reality, always and for all men, very short: soon it is evening, soon it is morning and we are soon at the week-end; it passes inexorably,  it allows minutes, hours, days, years to run away without allowing us to stop it; it is like an ice-cold wind which reaches me and leaves behind unmistakable signs in my person. Yet every day is an important and  unique "moment of my life; every day is unique, decisive and definitive; every day the gifts of nature and of grace are at my disposal to go on with the building up of my personality, according to a well-defined project of God for me.  According to the liturgical prayer, we have the consoling truth that "every day of our earthly pilgrimage is an ever newer gift of His love for us" 6.

Larranga writes: "A wise heart knows that it is foolish to cry, today, for something, that tomorrow will not be there; it knows that sufferings are taken away by the wind  (why to suffer?), that life is a flower, which lasts one day, that glory is the sound of a flute,  whose end is silence, that fashion is changeable, that caducity and transience are the truth, that appearances are a lie, that we suffer and agonise for the falsity of things, that the appearance seduces and tyrannises us, compels and bends us" 7.

Wherefore, a wise heart accepts, with a strong and serene spirit, the unavoidable limits of all human creatures: that some frontiers of our existence cannot be overcome, that some natural laws are to be accepted and respected, that some voids cannot be filled in.  It accepts all this not because of a blind determinism, but only because of the existing unchangeable nature of every creature. To perceive and to accept these limitations with serenity is the sign of a great wisdom. To catch all the good strewn in creation, to admire its order, to discover God's footprints in every event, without going beyond the human limits: this is wisdom.

Man's heart is wise when it knows how "to make a step proportioned to the leg, according to a well known proverb, which ponders the daily choices and the big options of life; when it is realistic and only a little or not at  all idealist;  when it does not give in to illusions, thus avoiding hot delusions; when it knows how to be set free from false securities, to face honestly the various difficulties, disappointments, contradictions, disesteem and isolation.

This wise man does not spare fatigues and renunciations, to overcome unfavourable situations; appeals to all his personal resources,  invests generously all his energies and all the time at his disposal, then he submits himself with docility and serenity to the provident love of the Lord, who gives us everything in due time.

An opposite to the wise heart is the foolish heart (àphron - empty, foolish, senseless, stupid … )8, a nonsense because it does not distinguish  appearance from reality; it takes justice for impiety, good for evil, innocent for guilty, thus falling into a colossal paradox: he thinks to be wise and calls others foolish; he entwines an endless series of nonsense and absurdity, multiplying a river of empty words. The man with a wise heart minds the warning of him who wrote the Proverbs: "Unreliable as the legs of the lame, so is a proverb in the mouth of fools" (Pr 26,7).

The wise man, instead,  "keeps his eyes open" Qohelet teaches (Qo 2,14), that is, he is  adequately open to reality, gives value to what is good and to what is better (Qo 9,6), ponders what is good and what is evil (Qo 7,15-18), fetches abundantly from the book of experience, discerns before choosing and does not fall into deceitful traps; he does not shun the fatigue of reflection and research and, consequently, enjoys the conquest; he moderates his talking in society; the few messages he proffers are the fruit of a long and suffered meditation; he is well convinced that often the word is faster than light and, once proffered, it is not possible to get it back, as Metastasio also says, "Voce dal sen fuggita,/poi richiamar non vale; / non si trattien lo strale, / quando dall'arco uscì" (Once the word is uttered, we can't call it back; it is not possible to stop the arrow once it has left the bow). In a few words, the wise man is good, but not ingenuous, discreet but not absent, patient but not inactive.