W. David O. Taylor on the Psalms and Praying the Unedited Life

And for many, again, outside of the faith or on the margins of faith, they do wonder whether it is permissible to bring their whole, unedited self before the Almighty, and the psalms offer a resounding “Yes.”

From the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, you are listening to Public Worship and the Christian Life, a podcast that amplifies people and stories that share wisdom and wonder about Christian public worship. This season for the podcast, we are dwelling in the psalms, the prayer book and songbook of the Bible. Welcome to the podcast.

Welcome. My name is Joyce Borger, program manager at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, and I am delighted to host this podcast with David Taylor. Dr. David Taylor is the associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, the author of several books, including A Body of Praise, Prayers for the Pilgrimage, and the forthcoming book To Set the World Aflame. Worth noting for today’s conversation, David has also written a book on the psalms, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life. An Anglican priest, he has written essays for The Washington Post, the Calvin Theological Journal, Worship, and Christianity Today, among others. He lives on twenty-one acres east of Austin, Texas, with his wife and children. David, we are delighted to have you with us, to learn from you about the psalms, to hear about the place of the psalms in your own life, and to be encouraged ourselves to dwell more deeply with them. Welcome, David.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, and I love the Institute, so I’m always happy to hang out with you all.

Great. So, why the psalms? I mean, there are a lot of books in the Bible. You could have chosen another book. What pulled you into the psalms?

I think I would say two things to that. One, I was not raised in a tradition that made much of the psalms. My tradition, you could say, was largely Baptist in orientation. And so while we loved scripture and held it in high regard, the psalms rarely factored into our common worship and prayer life. I can’t remember a single sermon on the psalms. I’m sure psalm language seeped into our hymns, because that’s impossible to completely avoid the psalms in traditional hymnody, but it wasn’t until my second year in seminary in the mid-’90s, I took a course with Eugene Peterson. It was a wonderful course. I write about it in the book. It was this expansive vision of a life that was shaped by holy scripture, but at no point did he give us any practical help to know how to live into this, so at the end of that class I raised my hand and asked him if he could give us something to walk away with. What he offered to us was an encouragement to begin reading a psalm a day and get to the end of all 150 and then start over. That was the first time, odd as it may seem, that I had ever been invited to read the psalms, to take them seriously. And so I did, for several years, work my way through all 150, start over. And some days were easy, like Psalm 117 is bite size; Psalm 119 was more than a bite size. And I just kept going and going, and they began shaping the furniture of my interior life. And then eventually this opportunity to convene a conversation between Eugene Peterson and Bono happened, and then that opened up more opportunities to think about the psalms, to read about the psalms, and to talk about the psalms. And then eventually I start getting the same question over and over, which is: What one book could you recommend to us if we wanted to go more deeply. And as I looked at the books that I was collecting, including one by John Witvliet, former director at CICW, I realized a lot of the books on my shelf were either more academically oriented, scholarly, or more devotionally oriented. And I was really grateful for both, but I had a hard time finding those that were in that middle space, that were substantial, but accessible. I didn’t imagine I would be the person to write it, because I’m not trained in the Old Testament; I’m a not a psalm scholar. But then I realized I didn’t have to write as a scholar; I could write it as a pastor. And I thought, Oh, that’s a task that I would feel less intimidated by, even though with the fear of God I wrote the whole thing. And then when that was published, it opened up more opportunities to talk to congregations and other folks, and then eventually I got a chance to teach a class on spiritual formation through the psalms. So it’s been a very slow, iterative, organic process. I can’t imagine life without the psalms. Why that and any other, I guess you could say I believe enough in the sovereignty of God to be led, but I’m also inhabiting a stream of saints throughout history who have cherished it. So in a sense I’m not alone, but I am late to the party. And I’m glad that I'm late, but not never.

I think many of us relate with maybe the late, but we’re catching up and growing in our love for the psalms as well. Now, you mentioned being in a stream of saints that have loved the psalms. You also mentioned conversations with Bono and so more of a secular context. Why do you think it is that the psalms have not only just sustained saints throughout history and many people who are living now, but also have found their way into the secular consciousness?

Well, I tell my students that it is rather bizarre, if you think about it, that we are reading 3,000-year-old poems. I mean, how many of us could quote any other poet from three thousand years ago? From the outside, it’s a strange thing. From the inside, we recognize as Christians that God has authored this collection, or the Holy Spirit has superintended the writing and collection and canonization of this. And again, as I tell my students, God has given us the psalms in order to teach us how to talk to God. And by virtue of being made into the image of God, we have instincts for praying and talking to God truly. But in order talk to God truthfully, faithfully, consistently, we need to be taught how to do that. And that’s why we have been given the psalms. The psalms are also, as I’ve told Christians in various settings, some of the most psychologically intelligent collection of poems, as many have said throughout history. Calvin calls it the anatomy of the soul; Tim Keller called it the medicine chest of the heart. Everything that human beings have ever wondered or worried about, feared or hoped, it’s there. And so I think Christians, as well as those outside of the household of faith, if they have encountered the psalms, they have, as Athanasius once put it, they’ve seen a mirror of themselves played out in the landscape. Now, there are reasons why Bono has been drawn to the psalms—reasons of his upbringing, reasons of specific people that are very influential to him, having been raised in a home where his father loved opera, he was shaped by the Anglican liturgy. He is a poet. His early influences, musical-wise, are punk rock. And so I think he sees in the psalms sort of that spirit of punk rock, as he would say, of just brutal honesty. And for many, again, outside of the faith or on the margins of faith, they do wonder whether it is permissible to bring their whole unedited self before the Almighty. And the psalms offer a resounding “Yes.” And so U2 as a band can sing all kind of songs that lift straight up from the text of the psalter, and nobody bats an eye because it is so resonant with human experience. And so you don’t need to know the Bible; you don’t even need to love the Bible to sense that whoever these poets are, they are naming the human experience in a way that is honest and truthful and comprehensive, and it taps into this deep yearning and ache inside of us to be known and loved by God as we are in our unedited selves. I think that would account for its attraction outside of Christian circles, at least.

So what about you? Do you have a favorite psalm? Something that you connect with? Does it change?

I mean, it’s a little bit like asking, do I love any one child more than another? And the answer is I love them each in their own unique personalities. It’s somewhat similar with the psalms, but the psalms are different. They're not children. And I think there’s a sense in which in different seasons of life I find myself gravitating toward some over the others. My wife and I struggled with infertility in the early years of our marriage, and so I found Psalm 22 to be especially helpful, to name what seemed to be nameless or to make sense of what seemed senseless in our lives. I love perennials, evergreens—I would say Psalm 121, just something beautiful about it. I’ve always found myself at home in Psalm 4 and 5 because they’re evening and morning psalms, and I love how they echo the Genesis narrative of there’s evening, there’s morning, there’s evening, there is morning—hat sense of going to sleep with this sense of God’s profound and intimate watch care. And when we’re asleep, we are the most vulnerable that we are ever to find ourselves, and so to know that in our complete vulnerability God watches over us, and as we awake with Psalm 5 the words, the psalmist would find us there again. And then I would say another one that I don’t ever tire of is Psalm 63:8, which has this just marvelous twin reality of it’s all God and all us, but always all God, where you have the psalmist saying, I cling to you, and yet your right hand upholds me. So I love how it is very much Jacobean, if you will, that we are always in a sense wrestling, holding on to God, and yet it is God who is always holding on us. So it matters that we cling, that we reach out. But at the same time, we can rest in the fact that God is gently and sometimes fiercely holding on to us. So those would be some that I just always find deeply helpful at any time of the day.

When you were doing the practice of reading through the psalms on a daily basis, did you ever run into a psalm where you're just like, I'm just not there today? And what do you do in those instances where you just like, I just don’t know what to do with this psalm right now?

Yeah, I mean, there are some that I would call the “occasionalist psalms,” like they’re coronation psalms or wedding psalms. I don’t feel them because they seem so foreign to me personally. I did get married, and I’m very grateful for that. I got married once, and that psalm served me well on that one day. But I’ll never be a king; I’ll never be a monarch.  So there’s some that I struggle with indifference, as like, I can think about them, but they don’t at a heart level do much for me. Others that may be difficult for different reasons: Psalm 119, it is such a long and seeming—well, it is repetitious, seemingly tedious. And I think because of my ecclesial location, my ecclesial culture—which is Anglican, and we do read the psalms rather frequently—but because maybe a Jewish or Israelite culture is foreign to me, I hear Psalm 119 and all I hear is what seems like a very dull repetition of “God’s law is important.” But I don’t hear those other textures and those other phrasings of images that all find their origin in this fact that God chose to disclose the divine life in a way that’s very intimate to Abraham, a burning bush to Moses. And that, within an ancient Near Eastern society, is an extraordinarily unusual thing. And again, like the Genesis narrative of being made in the image of God, only divine figures in ancient Near Eastern societies had the privilege of being born in the image of the divine being. But now Genesis 1 and 2 democratize us. We are all made in the [image], we are all royal figures. We all have access, intimate access, as, let's say, children, daughters of the king. And I think that language of God’s Torah, God’s instruction being a very intimate word sounds differently to, let’s say, a Jewish person and Israel, an Israelite, than to me. Once I began to understand that, and once I understand that the point isn’t to truck my way in the most efficient way possible through Psalm 119, but to marinate my way through, then I realize how I go through it matters as much as what I am reading. And that, I think, is an important thing for me to learn, an important thing for me help my students understand. Beyond that, it would be like the imprecatory psalms or the psalms of praise on days when I’m not feeling it. But then, I mean, I eventually learned and discovered and wrote about this: that so much of the psalms are forging in us the virtue or the habit of empathy and sympathy. So the point isn’t to satisfy my immediate needs of the day. The point is that psalms are orienting my heart to the things that God cares about, orienting my heart to things that my neighbor cares about. And obviously my most immediate neighbors are my wife, my children, family, friends, students, colleagues, and then it extends outward; everyone is my neighbor. So I don't need to come to a praise psalm or an imprecatory or a lament psalm and feel it, because I don’t come to it as a consumer. I come to as somebody whose opportunity it is to be formed. All my senses get to be formed, all my faculties are formed, orienting me yet again to the things that God cares about, the things that my neighbor is feeling and needing. And then I also have needs met legitimately, and that’s fine, but it’s not simply about what I am going to get out of it. And I think many of my peers in my tradition of upbringing have been habituated to the point of the psalms is to find something that speaks to me. There’s nothing wrong with it speaking to me, but if that’s the only mode or orientation. I think you’re going to be disappointed by a great deal of the psalter.

So I’m picking up maybe on two themes as you talk. One about the psalms and how they form your relationship with God. And— well, now I just used that other word; I was thinking it was the formative aspect of the psalm, right? So maybe it’s two-directional, our relationship with God and our relationship with others, and maybe creation more broadly. Do you agree with that? And if so, what does that look like? What's the significance of that formative aspect?

I think I write about this in the book, and I’ve certainly talked about it at church retreats and other settings where I’ve been able to talk more at leisure about the psalms. One of the things that I share with folks is how so many of us have been shaped by our family cultures and our church cultures to think that there are certain ways that we can and cannot talk to God. So, I was never raised in the South, but my parents were of Southern origin, Texas and Georgia. And those cultures then translate or show up in family culture and church culture. There are certain ways in which you would never talk to God because you would never talk to your daddy that way or, you would never talk to your mama that way. And so if you don’t talk to parents that way, why would you ever think that you could talk to God that way? And again, I would say that the psalms have been given to us to retrain how we think about legitimate, permissible ways to address God and to be addressed by God. And so what may seem to be like having a smart mouth or an impudent way of speaking to somebody in authority is in fact a most natural way to speak to God. So reforming, retraining how we perceive what God wants and and welcomes is part of the psalter’s work. I would say a second example comes as it relates to God as judge and and then the justice that God will require of the world and of rulers and of those in authority, and again my tradition, my childhood tradition, I don’t think would ever put worship and justice together. Justice is something that secular authorities and institutions do. Justice is something that will happen at the very end of all things, in the eschaton, at the judgment seat of Christ. But justice and worship, at the very least or most, is what like liberal Christians would have done, or liberation theologies would have advocated. But when you begin to actually pay attention to the data that is there, you realize that there is no faithful worship or prayer apart from God’s work of executing justice, executing vengeance, and requiring just work and just relations of us. And that would, I think, have a powerful, formative feedback effect. Like, there is something at stake in how we pray and preach and read scripture together—gain, from my traditions. And then maybe on the horizontal side, justice as it relates to the nations, justice as it relates to creation. So that when the language of justice or just things or righteousness or right things, rightsizing things, that’s all assuming that this world has been fractured and warped by sin. And what we do in worship, in our singing and praying and so on, these things are at the center rather than at the periphery or beyond the margins of legitimate, faithful, true, authentic—whatever adjective you want to choose—worship. So I think every tradition probably has something that the psalms are bringing to light that is maybe a deficit in our traditions, our ecclesial traditions, or something defective in our ecclesial traditions that the psalter is constantly rectifying in some fashion.

You have, as a professor, as a priest, have had maybe a front-row seat in seeing people engaging with the psalms for the first time. What are some takeaways from that and what are you finding that people are surprised about or how they connect to the psalms?

Well, I think two example stories come to mind. One is from a time that I was talking about the psalms of lament with a Sunday school class at a Presbyterian church in Houston. And it was a Sunday school class for—I forget what the term was, but it was for seniors, for elders, for folks in their late sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, that older sort of category. And it was such a lovely experience. I really so enjoyed being with them and sharing with them some of these ideas on the psalms of lament. I had a gentleman come up to me afterward who was in his eighties, and he thanked me for what I had said, because he was raised in a Christian home, but a dysfunctional home. He told me there that his father had physically abused him, and that that had ended up leading him to conclude that his Father in heaven was similar and that there was no space for him to tell God how he really felt for this like visceral fear that if I tell my heavenly Father how I feel, I’ll get in trouble. And this was the first time . . . He had sort of had an intuition that maybe that was not right, but because his body and emotions and brain were so traumatized, he couldn’t escape the thought that if he told God how he really felt, that he would be punished for it. But I had said out loud what he had intuited, and finally he felt like he’d been given permission to begin escaping from the thrall of the effect of his physical father, his family father, biological father on him, and that he felt like something inside of him had opened up, like a place of freedom, of wholeness, of promise, of hope. And he didn’t know what it meant for him going forward, but he knew that whatever lay ahead, it was only sort of this sense that his heavenly Father deeply loved him, and that he could tell his heavenly Father everything that he felt for the first time, and that it was not too late. And I think that was the thing that was so deeply moving for me. It was a sense of like, it's not too late, I’m not too old. I’m not so spent by life and this damage that I experienced from my earthly father that I can’t open up to my heavenly Father this way. That was just such a beautiful moment for me. And then, maybe more briefly, I led a study of Psalm 23 for the sixth graders in our church a couple years ago, so eleven- and twelve- year-olds. And I’ve got to say, that was such an extraordinarily happy experience for me. Slowly but surely, we met once a month, and so we’d just do a line at a time. We’d look at the text; we’d wonder about the text. We’d wonder about its relationship to their lives as middle school kids. And what things do you think are enemies in your life? What things cause you to fear? What are valleys of dark things for you? What does it mean for God to prepare a table for you? And to hear those sweet, precious kids who come from very different families open up with me and open up with each other with sort of this realization that the language of “The Lord is my shepherd,” which they were familiar with, now just took on layers and layers of meaning in their real lives, in school, in neighborhoods, and at home, and for some of them in broken homes, was just so powerful for me. I can do graduate students, and I can preach sermons to adults, and it’s very satisfying in many ways, but to be with kids and to know that maybe I was a part of God’s shaping their interior lives at this age and that there’s maybe a hope that they would always have a fighting chance to believe that really God was their shepherd, like they really believe it in their guts, was very encouraging to me. So those are two ends of the generational spectrum that stayed with me in such a beautiful way.

I’m getting a sense of how, then, you titled your book, Open and Unafraid. Can you just say a little bit about that? Because I was really curious. You would expect a book on the psalms to pick up a quote from the psalms or something. And I was curious what you meant by open and unafraid? 

The original title that I pitched the publisher, they said let’s not go with that, which is perfectly fine. I had originally pitched the title Honest to God, because I love the double sense of it, how it is kind of a colloquial phrase—you’re hanging out with people or you’re in a courtroom, “Honest to God, judge, I did not do that!” And then the other, more literal sense of being honest to God and how the language of honesty shows up in so much writing about the psalms throughout Christian history. I resonated with that. But I think the other thing that I discovered is maybe at a deeper level, and I think maybe the case that I try to make to the reader in the book, is that God has given us the Psalms as a kind of devotional and liturgical antidote to the destructive, deleterious, awful dehumanizing effects of sin that caused our primordial parents and us ever afterward to run and hide from God and to fight God, to run, hide, and fight ourselves, to run, hide, fight others, and to run, hide, fight from the world and creation at large. And so the psalms are this gift, it's like an antidote that just helps us to open up God, ourselves, others, creation, to be open and unafraid rather than closed down, hiding, and fearful. And closed down, hiding, fearful is pretty much always the recipe for more damage in our relationship with God, in our relationships with ourselves, in our relations with people. And so the publisher came back, I think maybe they found some of this vocabulary in the book, and they just kind of put it together. And I was like, yeah, I think that probably says what I’m trying to say at the most profound theological level, translated into a devotional liturgical mode, that is, how I live my life with God and how I worship with the people of God, that this is in essence what the psalms are offering themselves. And I think in that sense, yeah, the medicine chest of the heart, it’s a chest, all kinds of things that can cure all kinds of ailments that we may have. And we are sick in so many different ways. So the psalms offer themselves as that kind of therapeutic medicinal aid.

You finished the class with Eugene Peterson, and you went to him and you asked him, “What practical things can I do?” And he said, “Read the psalms one a day.” If a student were to ask you that today, would that be your same answer, and would you have additional things to add to it? 

Yes, I think I would recommend that, but I don’t think I’d recommend it as the only way forward. The last thing I want is for my students to feel this burdensome expectation that there’s only one way to read the psalms or to gain benefit from the psalms. And if you look at church history, you discover all kinds of spiritual practices or exercises. So I like to give my students a range of possibilities because—Let's just say you’re a mother of seven children, and they’re all under the age of fifteen. It’s not impossible. You live a very different life than if you’re single and 28 and you’re a finance person making six figures. That’s just a different life circumstance. Or if you are at the end of your life, or whatever it is. So I like to give my students a range. So yes, one a day could be a possibility. Another possibility is just to sit with one psalm for a whole month or for six months. The goal isn’t to successfully read the psalter in the most efficient and effective way possible. I don’t think there's a prize or a medal that you get. It defeats the purpose, I think. So you could sit with a psalm, you could sit with a batch of psalms, you could do the Psalms of Ascent or the Hallelujahs or Psalm 22, 23, 24, because they could come as a triad, or you could just memorize one verse for a week. Just do a simple thing. Just let it kind of sink down. And so what I tell them is the psalms are more like a seven-course meal that you enjoy and savor over the course of four hours, not an astronaut packet that has taken that seven-course meal and distilled it down into a powder form and then you can chug down. You can, and you’ll get, I think, all the essential vitamins and minerals, but it defeats the purpose of that savoring quality and what happens when you savor that with others in a convivial setting or other kind of setting. So I try to give my students a range of ways to enter into it. And this would maybe assume more of a personal, private, but they are things that you can do with small groups, an entire church community that enable you to reckon with the psalms in a way that they have a fighting chance to begin slowly shaping and reshaping how you live in the world with God, others, and yourself. So those would be, I think, a few things that I would offer to them.

What might you do in a small-group setting, let’s say, or even as a family?

One of the assignments I give my students is to create a small-group handout. I ask them to choose one psalm and then to arrange the handout so there’s a combination of an exegetical look at the psalm, and you would want to have some resources to help them, like a handout or a supplement of . . .maybe some commentary could offer some insights into it, but mainly to allow a small group over the course of time to look at it from different angles. So let’s just say Psalm 23, let’s say you have no commentaries on hand—let’s say in a persecuted church community in some part of the world. All you have is the text. I think even in that setting, you could ask yourself, Where else in the psalter does the language of a sheep show up and a shepherd show up and a dark valley? It’s just to sort of find all the echoes, and then you could find your way in the same way that a scholar would say, ”Oh, this is all that’s going on,” I think an amateur or lay person could get part of the way through seeing how it is the psalms are already interpreting themselves and making the one psalm meaningful, and then you can also bring in personal experience and story. I say this with care because I don’t want a lay person or somebody with no expertise or no familiarity with church history or scholarly material to think that we can come to the psalter by ourselves in an autonomous way and that alone would yield a comprehensive benefit. So I’m wanting to make a space for both those who are on the proverbial island and only have the psalter and those who are not to know that you probably could . . . If you have the whole Bible, you can just extend the exercise beyond it, but I’d want to make it accessible and not stressful. I don’t want you to think that you have to have an academic library to benefit. But if there are supplementary resources, then take advantage of those. They would lead to really good conversations, and then maybe some spiritual practices of praying these things, or some relational activities that you could engage. There are lots of things you could do, and the point really is to do them in as thoroughgoing and immersive of a way as possible. Again, the goal is not to get done. The goal is to be transformed. And I think whatever practice or method you adopt, let it serve the purposes of a deep transformative experience rather than “I did it, now let’s go do the other thing.” I think that defeats that purpose.

Do you have any final words of wisdom or encouragement for people as they consider or continue their journey of dwelling with the psalms?

I would say if you have great familiarity and lifelong experience with it, but you have found yourself tiring of them or wearying of them or becoming bored with them, I would say that’s OK. Like, don't beat yourself up for finding them to be insipid, like your experience of them, they’ve lost their taste. If you feel that you’re in a community where there’s a pressure that you must be a capital P-Psalms Christian, I would say have grace for yourself if you want to take a break. And if there’s some other part of the Bible that you would like to venture in devotionally, that’s OK, too. I want to at least acknowledge that possibility. If you think to yourself, yes, they’ve grown tiresome to me. I don't know how to make them come alive, then what I would say to you is perhaps find a different translation, a translation that is significantly different. So sometimes I’ll read the King James. It’s very different from the normal English that I hear in my world. And I let the strangeness of it cause the familiarity, overfamiliarity, to feel fresh again. Now, to the person who has little experience with the psalms, I would say, don't let yourself become overwhelmed by it, because it can feel overwhelming. I would say start somewhere. If you want to start at the beginning, you can start at beginning. If you want to start in a place that feels familiar, start familiar, and then venture out into places that are maybe less familiar. Sit with one psalm for a while and just see what happens. Again, don’t place an undue stress upon your experience of it; just trust that as you read the psalms, the psalms will read you, and then the Holy Spirit will read you as well. And that reading will be for life’s sake. Some things may be exposed to the light, but it’s not because God is out to get you; it’s because God has so profoundly committed to your healing and your wholeness, and trust that as you sit with it, God will do a gracious work of mending in your life. And that can just be such a beautiful thing as well.

David, thank you so much for sharing on this podcast and sharing your heart and your knowledge and your encouragement on the psalms. I just want to end by encouraging people to look at your book Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life. As I've gone through it, there are fourteen chapters. You focus on different themes, which was for me a more unique way of looking at the psalms, and I was blessed by that. I was also really blessed by the questions you had at the end for reflection, and I think those will serve me well, even in the future, because I certainly didn’t ask them all. Some jumped out at me, and I’m sure the next time, if I were to look again, another one would, but also exercises and then a prayer at the end. So it is a wonderful book for individuals, but also to go through as a community if you’re looking for a place to begin a journey or continue a journey with the psalms. So I'm grateful for you, for that gift that you have given from your pastoral heart to the Christian church. So thank you again for coming on and sharing with us today.

My pleasure. Thanks so much, Joyce.