The Measure of My Days
“Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is. You have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing in your sight. Surely everyone stands as a mere breath.”
Psalm 39:4-5
William Stanley Merwin must have been a precocious child: he began writing hymns for his Presbyterian minister father when he was five years old! Better known as W. S. Merwin, as an adult, he traveled extensively and lived across the globe working as a literary translator and poet — the second of which made him one of the most widely read and celebrated American poets in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century.1
In one of his poems, “For the Anniversary of My Death,” Merwin acknowledges a day that passes by him each year, the day that will mark his death at some point in the future. The poet broods upon the inevitability of death and the strangeness and surprising nature of life itself, ultimately bowing to death’s inexorability.
Our psalmist quoted above, writing some two or more millennia earlier than Merwin, seems to be lamenting the same, wishing to know the date of which Merwin speaks of as if that would have a meaning or purpose beyond what he already has claimed, “Life is short!”
On Ash Wednesday, the message is unambiguous: We are dust and to dust, we shall return. Lent is a season for taking stock, for measuring, much like the plumb line God shows the prophet, Amos, that God will use to measure Israel’s religious and political institutions (Amos 7:7-8).
It is a time for reflection and assessing how we “measure up” in allowing the good news of Jesus Christ to enter our lives and change how we live: change how we grow more and more into Jesus’ very likeness. We can seek to know the measure or the number of our days, but it is through self-reflection and repentance, reconciliation with our neighbor and acknowledgment of our good and flawed inherent nature, that we can determine how we measure up.
And if your Lenten exercise of measuring leaves you worried and anxious, read ahead in the psalmist’s poem where he reminds us, as most laments do, “My hope is in you.” (Psalm 39:7)
For, try as we might, we will never measure up, but our hope is in God alone, and that, my friends, is part of the grace and gift of Lent … it makes our need for God so clear.
