Latest / The Weight / "Open and Unafraid" with W. David O. Taylor

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"Open and Unafraid" with W. David O. Taylor · The Weight

• 0:00
  Chris McAlilly: I'm Eddie Rester.
• 0:01
  Chris McAlilly: I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.
• 0:03
  Eddie Rester: Today we have David Taylor with us. David's a professor from Fuller Seminary.
• 0:06
  Eddie Rester: He's written a lot of great books about worship and a life of worship. But his most recent one is a book called "Open and Unafraid." It's a book about the psalms, and it's got a foreword written by Eugene Peterson, who has a lot to say.
• 0:24
  Chris McAlilly: And an afterword written by Bono. So this guy hangs out with some interesting characters.
• 0:29
  Eddie Rester: And us. He hangs out with interesting characters.
• 0:31
  Chris McAlilly: Like Bono, Eugene Peterson, Eddie, and me.
• 0:35
  Eddie Rester: It's a... You know, I feel like we're now in a unique circle.
• 0:39
  Chris McAlilly: Well, I, you know, I've been hanging out with you for so long, Eddie, that I feel like I need to kind of, you know...
• 0:43
  Eddie Rester: Step up your game.
• 0:44
  Chris McAlilly: I'm trying to step up my game. But you know.
• 0:46
  Chris McAlilly: Anyway. I'm glad to be in conversation. You know, the thing about this conversation, for me, is that some of this territory is, it's just basic, in terms of pastoral ministry. I mean, people come all the time asking questions about, "I don't know if my prayers are being answered. I'm not sure how to pray about this thing, or even how to pray at all." And if that's where you are, or you want to grow in your understanding of what prayer is and how to pray biblically, it's a good conversation.
• 1:18
  Chris McAlilly: On the other end, I think, our folks who've kind of given up on the church or given up on the Bible or on God, or even the possibility that prayers can be answered. And we talk a lot about the arts as a way of engaging our full humanity, but also the ways in which, in some surprising ways, the Bible includes this aesthetic literary dimension, that perhaps can give you a way back in.
• 1:48
  Eddie Rester: I think, for me, there's so many great points of contact in this conversation.
• 1:51
  Eddie Rester: Psalms are such--for me--just in my own spiritual life have been so important in particular moments. But when he brought up Psalm 88, and then its connection to Psalm 89, just the honesty of Psalm 88. "My only friend is darkness" is basically how Psalm 88 lands. And then Psalm 89 follows it with this,"but I trust in the steadfast love of the Lord." And it brings together really, just all of life, which is what the psalms do for us.
• 2:29
  Eddie Rester: The psalms invite us to a level of honesty that is rare and that often we don't feel we can offer, not just to friends or family, but a level of honesty we're even scared to offer before God when we're angry, or sad, or frustrated, or depressed. And the psalms invite us to offer who we actually are to God. And he just does such a wonderful job of explaining the significance of the psalms for us in our continued seeking after God.
• 3:06
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, it's a great conversation today. We're glad that you've joined us to listen to it. And if you really like it, you should share it with your mom, maybe your dad, your grandma. Share it with your kids, your neighbors, your friends, or colleagues.
• 3:20
  Chris McAlilly: Basically share it with everyone that you know, so that the whole world can receive the good news of The Weight podcast, don't you think, Eddie?
• 3:29
  Eddie Rester: That seems strong.
• 3:29
  Eddie Rester: That seems strong today. Maybe just so that some people can receive the goodness.
• 3:35
  Chris McAlilly: So just maybe just one person. It doesn't have to be everybody. Just one.
• 3:39
  Eddie Rester: Thank you for listening every week, and we're so grateful that you're sharing in the journey with us.
• 3:45
  Chris McAlilly: [INTRO] Life can be heavy. So heavy, in fact that the weight we carry can sometimes cause us to lose hope.
• 3:53
  Eddie Rester: But we've all come across those people in life who seem to be experiencing the same world we live in, except they maintain a great depth of joy and hope.
• 4:02
  Chris McAlilly: A former generation called this gravitas.
• 4:04
  Chris McAlilly: It was their description of a soul that had gained enough weightiness to be attractive, like all things with a gravitational pull.
• 4:13
  Eddie Rester: Those are the people we want to talk to. On this podcast, we talk to pastors, entrepreneurs, artists, mental health experts, and many others.
• 4:23
  Chris McAlilly: We'll create space for heavy topics. But we'll be listening for a quality of soul that could be called gravitas.
• 4:30
  Eddie Rester: Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
• 4:32
  Chris McAlilly: Well, we're here today with David Taylor. David, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us.
• 4:38
  David Taylor: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
• 4:40
  Chris McAlilly: I came across your book on the psalms a couple years ago and have had an opportunity to engage it, and we're looking forward to talking to you abou the book and some of your work, but for folks that maybe don't know you or kind of what you've been writing about or thinking about for the last couple of decades, maybe give just a thumbnail sketch of who you are and where you are.
• 5:09
  David Taylor: Okay. Sure. I was born and raised in Guatemala City. My parents were missionaries. So we lived there'til I was 13, then moved around the states a bit, landed at the University of Texas. So I did my undergrad and then did seminary work at a school in Vancouver, British Columbia called Regent College, and did an MA in theology. I teach in New Testament. But during those five years of study, I would fly back to Austin, and began interning at a church, exploring the place of the arts, and that was '96.
• 5:41
  David Taylor: So, you know, 27 years ago.
• 5:45
  Eddie Rester: One of the things I noticed in looking at the And then I joined the church full time, and was a pastor for about 10 years, had responsibility over adult other work that you've done, is it really, you've been drawn to education, was part of the preaching team, but gave a lot of energy to a community of artists that we had at the the life of worship in the church. You know, I'm excited.
• 6:01
  Eddie Rester: church. About 125 artists in the city of Austin, you know, trying Man, Austin is a place of artists and that's one of the to figure out how we can be faithful in our life and work as artists within the context of the church, but also within the context of the city. And then my wife and I moved to Durham, North Carolina, where I did my doctoral work at Duke Divinity.
• 6:23
  Eddie Rester: And then now I have been teaching at Fuller Seminary for nine years. I teach theology, but I also teach a lot of courses related to the arts. And then I have a lifelong interest in the psalms. And that's, I guess, the long and short of it.
• 6:42
  Eddie Rester: things I associate with the city of Austin. How did you, where did that love of worship and creativity and kind of the life of worship of followers of Jesus, where did that come from for you?
• 7:10
  David Taylor: Yeah, you know, that's a funny... That's a funny thing. I think earlier in my years, I never would have imagined I would land in a place where, properly speaking, I am a liturgical theologian. Geoffrey Wainwright was at Duke Divinity.
• 7:27
  Eddie Rester: I love Geoffrey Wainwright.
• 7:29
  David Taylor: Yeah, I know. He is such a gem of a human and such a gift to both the academy and the church. So very grateful for him. And you know, it wasn't until, it must have been like latter, middle years of college, during my time at University of But it wasn't until I was at this church in Austin, where I began interning, that the worship leader whose name was Texas. But I found myself leading worship for our college Deb Doorman, she pulled me aside, she said, "You know what?
• 8:42
  David Taylor: I've watched you, you know, sing, and you have the heart of a worshiper." And, oddly enough, I never thought of myself as ministry. And I really, really, truly, deeply enjoyed doing like, a person who had the heart of a worshiper. I don't know if I was... I don't think I was embarrassed by that fact. But definitely, like, in a world of, you know, smarty pants, Honors that. And I would sometimes help lead worship for campus, like, College kind of people, the heart of a worshiper is not a cool thing to do. But it resonated deeply, the sense of like, you know what? I actually do love to worship.
• 9:19
  David Taylor: And I would be the guy, this was in my mid 20s, I'd be at the back of the sanctuary, standing in sort of this back alcove, how to say to sort of inter-campus ministry activities moving. And I always felt like, oh, my body I love being in my body. And I love sort of being able to move in my body and I have always loved dancers, not being one myself. But yeah, so at University of Texas, like when different campus ministries all throughout my 20s I found myself leading worship and then realizing, oh, I do love this work that God has called me to do. And then when I landed at Duke, and I was asked, well, would get together. I would sometimes help lead worship. But what do I want to study? I knew I wanted to study theology in the arts. I wasn't sure about a secondary area, and I spoke with Lester Ruth. I don't know if you all know Lester.
• 10:06
  Eddie Rester: Lester, yeah.
• 10:07
  David Taylor: That's a delightful liturgical historian by training and by trade. And he said, "Well, why don't you do I think at the time, I thought mainly it was like just liturgical stuff?" Liturgical studies. And I don't, again, I just, I don't know why it didn't all coalesce in my own thinking, but it made perfect sense. Like, I couldn't think of anything else that I would want to do that would give me such deep something I liked. I liked the guitar. I liked singing. I liked pleasure. So my secondary area of study was liturgical studies.
• 10:35
  David Taylor: And ever since then, you know, 20 years worth, 25 years worth, I derive so much pleasure from helping church pastors, clergy, worship leaders, lay people, in terms of the fullness of helping this activity kind of happen, genuinely, sincerely.
• 10:48
  David Taylor: whatever that may mean, you know, in your own, you know, congregational or traditional, or denominational context. But yeah, I love it. I love doing it. I love what I get to do.
• 11:01
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, so the other kind of dimension here that I'm thinking about is, for folks who maybe they grew up in the church, or maybe they have no connection to... I mean, worship for them, or the church for them, is not a place where they experience the fullness of life. Or perhaps it's a place that, you know, somebody has been burned or hurt or whatever.
• 11:28
  Chris McAlilly: And they find those deep, kind of meaningful human connections through the world of the aesthetics, the world of the arts. And, you know, that's another dimension. I think about in my own experience. I grew up, you know, my dad's a pastor. So I was always in the church. And then in college, I didn't... I don't know. I didn't kind of give up on the church, but I just kind of drifted away.
• 11:57
  Chris McAlilly: And then I ended up studying abroad in Europe. And so I, for the first time, kind of had an opportunity to travel through these European cathedrals and go to these various churches that were full of the visual arts in a way that being a Protestant in the Deep South... You know, I mean, some of the music was really good, but the walls were pretty bare. And so I don't know. I was just really captivated by the beauty, just the full aesthetic beauty that could imagine a space so grand as Notre Dame or whatever. And there are all kinds of complications around the way in which the church has patronized the arts through time. But leaving that aside, just kind of bracketing that... For a person who, for whom the arts are really their way of engaging the world, you know, speak to kind of that end of your desire, your passion.
• 13:02
  David Taylor: Yeah, so, maybe it's just a bit of background.
• 13:06
  David Taylor: Having grown up in Guatemala in, let's just say, a conservative evangelical world, within a predominantly Catholic country, all of my friends were Catholic.
• 13:16
  David Taylor: They all went to Mass. They all worshiped in, you know, aesthetically and artistically maximalist type spaces. And in my experience, of church as a child, we saw many people leave the Catholic Church and become, well, in their words become Christian. They became Protestant, in this case. And they did not want all of that.
• 13:43
  David Taylor: They wanted something else. They wanted to have direct access to Scripture. They wanted to have an actual prayer life. They wanted to have a sense of mission.
• 13:54
  David Taylor: So they were trafficking in one direction, whereas in the late 90s, when I was in seminary, you had the kind of the surge of the emergent church movement, which was a movement amongst many Protestants hungering for a more sensory rich, more artistically rich, more beautiful type worship, a more ancient type worship, hunger for liturgy. And that's, you know, 20 years ago.
• 14:28
  David Taylor: And I was talking to somebody recently that so much of these renewal movements in worship have a kind of... There are these 10 year cycles and 20 year cycles or rhythms to them. And I think consistently, at least within an American context, you have folks that have grown up in a low church settings or, you know, denominational contexts where preaching and a certain kind of music are primary and the other arts are secondary or completely absent or potentially dangerous. And yet you have some for whom, as you say, maybe have found church to be stale, atrophied, cliched, or they found it to be problematic in some way. And if they find their way back, I think it is often through this kind of sensory, aesthetically rich.
• 15:26
  David Taylor: What I tell my students is that one of the unique features of the arts is that they bring us into an intentional and intensive experience of the aesthetic aspect of our humanity, which is to say, with our imaginative, affective, and sensory faculties. Now, I would make the case that God has wired us, designed us to love these things, to love the Triune God through our imaginations, affections, and senses. And we see that all throughout the psalms. We see that all throughout the prophets. We see that all throughout the Gospels.
• 16:06
  David Taylor: We see it all throughout the book of Revelation. So there's a God-given designed hunger for this.
• 16:13
  David Taylor: And I think when folks that have wandered to the margins of the church or to the margins of the faith, but then find themselves wandering back, there's a sense in which these other art forms, whether poetry or theatre, or the kinetic arts or cinematic arts, they are tapping into these hungers to want to encounter the living God and this world that God so loves, this created world through these sensory, aesthetic rich means.
• 16:51
  Eddie Rester: One of the things N.T. Wright, and I can't ever remember which book. N.T. Wright writes stuff.
• 16:56
  Eddie Rester: He writes a lot of books.
• 16:57
  David Taylor: He does.
• 16:57
  Chris McAlilly: He writes a lot of books, a lot of great books.
• 16:59
  Chris McAlilly: If you're not familiar with N.T.
• 16:59
  Chris McAlilly: Wright, go find an N.T. Wright book today. Might be "Simply Christian," but he talks about
• 17:04
  Eddie Rester: That is wired into us, that we're drawn to that the role of beauty.
• 17:12
  Eddie Rester: aesthetic, that that's something that God uses to draw us in. I think sometimes the church loses, has lost that or seems to push that secondarily.
• 17:26
  Eddie Rester: One of the books you wrote, your most recent book is about the psalms, which is about, for people who may not be familiar, the psalms, you hear that, you may hear that a lot. But they actually were written as songs and poetry. So tell us what draws you to the psalms? Why was it important for you to write a book about the psalms? You call it a guide to life.
• 17:51
  David Taylor: Yeah. Yeah, I, again, was raised in a tradition that made very little use of the psalms. I can't remember a single sermon on the psalms. I can't remember a single Bible study on the psalms. Obviously, psalmic language shows up in hymns and such. But yeah, they were peripheral to my spiritual formation as a child. And it wasn't until I was in seminary in a class with Eugene Peterson, where he was helping us understand what he called a biblical spirituality or spiritual theology through Holy Scripture, kind of this, you know, panoramic, narrative rich vision of life before God. But he would bring in church history and theology and literature and poetry and Greco Roman theology.
• 18:46
  David Taylor: It was just sort of this rich, rich introduction to spiritual theology.
• 18:54
  David Taylor: But not a single once did he give us advice. Like, what do we do? How do we practically? Like, how do I live in this? And I think he would, because of his upbringing, he was resistant to how-tos, because he felt like they were often reductionistic.
• 19:10
  David Taylor: But I was 23 and frustrated. And so I raised my hand on the last day of class, and I said, "Dr.
• 19:14
  David Taylor: Peterson, this is amazing. You got to help us out. Tell us one thing that we could be doing to live into this." So he thought about it for a moment. And then his answer was, "Well, David tomorrow read Psalm 1. And then the next day, read Psalm 2, and then the next day, read Psalm 3.
• 19:32
  David Taylor: And get to the end, start over.
• 19:32
  David Taylor: Thank you and have a good night." And I thought, well, there you go. That's the way of Eugene.
• 19:40
  David Taylor: But I did that. The next day, I read Psalm 1, and then 150 days later, I got to the end, and I started over and I have been reading the psalms for 25 years almost daily. And I read it in different ways, in different rhythms. I have different practices, because church history shows us all sorts of ways that we can enter in to the world of the psalms, and eventually I found it reshaping the way that I saw the world and I saw God and I saw myself. It retrained my ideas of God. It retrained my affections for God.
• 20:13
  David Taylor: It taught me to see the world in a different way.
• 20:19
  David Taylor: So then to really answer your question, or at least one part of your question, after I had directed the film, the short film with Bono and Eugene Pearson, I found myself having opportunities to talk to folks, Christian communities, congregations about the psalms.
• 20:32
  David Taylor: And invariably, somebody would say, "Well, can you recommend a book?" And I had collected resources over time, and I had a wonderful collection of academic scholarly books. I had a wonderful collection, on the other side, of more devotional.
• 20:44
  David Taylor: Like, you know, Eugene has a little devotional, and Timothy Keller had a little. There, like, bite sized, and they're wonderful. But I had a hard time finding something in the middle, that was both meaty and accessible as an introduction to the world or the landscape of the psalter.
• 21:01
  David Taylor: And I thought, dang it, maybe I should write that. But I'm not an Old Testament scholar. I'm not a psalms scholar. So I, you know, with a good deal of fear and trembling, I ventured in.
• 21:12
  David Taylor: But then I rescued myself from paralyzing anxiety by telling myself I could simply write it as a pastor. I don't have to write it as an academic. I can just write it with a pastoral mind or pastoral heart and do it as a way to introduce people into this prayer book that God has given to us in order to teach us how to talk to God and listen to God, alongside the people of God. And I love it. I don't tire of it. I mean, I'll jump into different translations of the Psalms to keep it fresh.
• 21:48
  David Taylor: I have a book that has a series of woodcuts that accompany each Psalm. And so I'll use that as like visual sort of devotional aid. I love it. I love.
• 21:58
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah, that's so great. And we have to put a pin in the fact that you sat down with Eugene Peterson and Bono and come back to that for a moment. I'm sure you've talked about that through the years.
• 22:07
  Eddie Rester: Yeah, I want to come back to that. But one thing, for folks who may not know Eugene Peterson, one of the, he was and will remain a good gift to the church and to pastors. Just a gentle soul who helped people see the joy of scripture in life. And the work that most people are familiar with of his, obviously, is the Message translation. But I just wanted to say just a word about Eugene, and I'm thankful to know that he helped shape your life so wonderfully.
• 22:41
  Chris McAlilly: Yeah. I do you think, you know that there's a lot of preaching out there that's kind of driven by the wisdom tradition of how-to, and do this, and do that. And most of the self-help genre and most business literature is all about, like, "give me the playbook." You know? And it's all... I don't know. Like, that stuff I remember being at the theology library at one point, and they were selling books. And these were all books from, you know, the 60s, 70s, and 80s that nobody ever checked out, and were selling them for 50 cents.
• 23:16
  Chris McAlilly: And all of them were either church and psychology or church and business. And they were all very... It was like church and self-help, church and corporate America. And they all were these formulaic things, and they all have a shelf life, and they all fall away.
• 23:32
  Chris McAlilly: And so I think, what's the book of Eugene Peterson's that I read every year is his memoir on being a pastor.
• 23:41
  David Taylor: Yeah.
• 23:41
  Chris McAlilly: And one of the things about that book that really helps me as a pastor is it reminds me that like, ultimately, my role is not to be a CEO. My role is not to be an amateur psychologist, or to give out, dole out wisdom in these kinds of bullet points, but rather, to be a caretaker of the story, and to offer people an opportunity to live into a different story. And, you know, not to try to kind of plug God into their story, but rather to help them see that God's story is the story of which they can be apart. And that's beauty. You know, taking a psalm at a time is a way of doing that, you know. It's saying, I don't know what to pray, so I'm going to pray what people have been praying in this timeless manner for literally thousands upon thousands of years. It literally is an ancient wisdom tradition, and it's a long obedience in the same direction, and over the course of time, it can retrain your capacity to see the world and the story of which you are apart, even if you still don't know what the heck to do next, you know.
• 24:55
  Chris McAlilly: It reminds me, I was talking to a younger guy on our staff who is going to be preaching this Sunday about Romans 12, verse 12, where Paul's talking about rejoicing and hope, being patient in suffering and being constant in prayer. And that constancy of praying the psalms, even when you don't know what to pray, you know, I think is one of the gifts of it. And I think maybe I would ask you kind of, you know... I think one of the things that I hear in people that resist praying the psalms, or praying formulaic prayers, or prayers that have been written, is that they aren't my prayers, or they're not authentic to me, or they're not expressive of where I am that day. Maybe speak to that a little bit, just when you're working with students, or when you're trying, as a pastor, to kind of give people a way in.
• 25:49
  Chris McAlilly: How do you think about that, praying somebody else's prayers that they wrote as your own?
• 25:55
  David Taylor: Well, again, you know, my denominational, traditional upbringing would have always favored the spontaneous prayer. And again, in a Catholic country, we would have sort of dug our heels in even more so on the resistance to written prayers. I actually have a book of collect prayers coming out next spring. It's written prayers. So I wrote an entire introduction imagining people in my various world saying, "Why should I bother praying a written prayer?" So it has been on my mind. So the kinds of things that I tell my students to help equip them when they are in their own communal or congregational contexts is to begin with the Lord's Prayer.
• 26:51
  David Taylor: That is a written, that is a given prayer, that is a prayer that is handed down to us, which is where we get the language of tradition. And so at the very least, our Lord Himself is commending a written prayer.
• 27:06
  David Taylor: Secondly, the Psalter, I tell my students, has been finally, or definitively in theological terms authored by the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the author of all of Scripture. And so if we believe that all scripture is God-inspired, then we must reckon with the fact that God thought it was good for our health, in every sense, to be entrusted with a collection of prayers that would teach us how to think about God and to feel about God and to talk to God.
• 27:48
  David Taylor: And so Bonhoeffer talks about this at length in his book on the psalms, how it's not our prayers that determine the meaning of the psalter. But it's the psalter's prayers that then teach us how to pray. That, left to our own devices over time, we will pray either deficiently or problematically, and we will bring to our prayer life certain assumptions about God that had been malformed by our broken personalities, our broken family cultures, our broken church cultures, our broken national culture, so on and so forth.
• 28:21
  David Taylor: And so I talk about this in particular with say, questions of sadness and anger. That a lot of us have grown up in family cultures, or church cultures, or the deep south culture where you don't talk to authority figures in a certain way. And yet, the Psalter, as this book of prayers, is teaching and training us to be able to bring to God you know, certain words that may sound impudent, may sound disrespectful, may sound unfaithful. But we need to submit ourselves, immerse ourselves in this world of written prayers, because fundamentally, we believe that we are disciples. And to be a disciple is to be trained, to be given over to a series of exercises, that reform or transform or conform, you know, whatever word you want to choose, our life to the life of Jesus.
• 29:21
  David Taylor: And one of the things that I think is so interesting--and you know, I help my students are unpack this in their own lives, in their own communities--s that in that exchange that Jesus has in Luke 24 with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and they don't get things and he says,"Well, boy, you really haven't understood scripture. And if you really had read it, well, you would understand that everything that has been written about me in the Torah, in the prophets..." And then most of us have just, that third descriptor had sort of Charlie Brown's teacher, you know, kind of kick in, like, "Wah wah wah wah wah." Because it just doesn't register for us that everything that has been written about Jesus in the psalms is fulfilled. And so that causes us to re-see Jesus as the true psalmist, the true prayer.
• 30:22
  David Taylor: He, himself, was immersed in the world of the psalms. He, himself, from a very early age, memorized this collection of praises, as the Hebrew title puts it. So to enter into his prayer life is to enter into a life of written prayers. If we want to be about Jesus's business, then let's be about that.
• 30:40
  Eddie Rester: You say that, and I remember. I was in my 20s. I might have been out of seminary or close to the end of seminary, before I realized that from the cross, Jesus is praying Psalm 22. That he's not just making up words.
• 30:55
  David Taylor: No, he's not.
• 30:56
  Eddie Rester: That the psalms have been so woven into his life, in this moment of brokenness and pain...
• 31:03
  David Taylor: Right.
• 31:04
  Eddie Rester: Singing a song.
• 31:04
  Eddie Rester: That's one of the most powerful psalms out there. So, go ahead, Chris.
• 31:11
  Chris McAlilly: No, that's beautiful. I mean, I remember a sermon one time from my preaching professor in seminary who talked about how, when you don't know what to say, it's helpful to have language given to you. And, you know, one of the... I think he was describing scripture in general, but it's certainly the case for the psalms, that you have this language that's kept in waiting for the time that you might need it.
• 31:37
  David Taylor: Exactly.
• 31:38
  Chris McAlilly: And it's a real spiritual resource. It is rich with, you know, all the things that you would think of as categories that would pertain to just literature in general. So I mean, there's metaphor and imagery, and kind of all the rest. So, I was an English major in college, and so when I realized that the psalms were like poetry, in the way that I loved all this other poetry, and I found it to be deeply meaningful in kind of giving me language for the atmosphere of my soul, and that I could bring that same love and joy and appreciation for the aesthetic world of poetry back to the Bible and read the Bible as literature, as poetry.
• 32:23
  David Taylor: Right.
• 32:23
  Chris McAlilly: It just opened up. And not just as like a rulebook to follow, or, you know, moral exhortation and instruction, or whatever. It wasn't just about... Scripture wasn't just trying to give me a language for what was good or what was true, but also what was both beautiful and, you know, expansive for my soul. I mean, that... It was a game changer, you know, for me. And so I guess, you know, for someone who's unfamiliar with the psalms, could you maybe just spend a little bit of time kind of talking about the Bible, not just as a spiritual resource, but as literature, as poetry?
• 33:03
  David Taylor: Right. Well, I write about this in the book, that the psalms are this... It's a musical world. There's a musicality to these prayers, because fundamentally, they're poetry. And what I love is sort of seeing how at the very beginning of Scripture and at the very end of Scripture, sort of these two places that are, you could say, the most profound
• 33:39
  mysteries: the beginning of all things and then the true end of all things. They exceed our capacity to logically, rationally figure out. And so we have to go into this other language of poetry or metaphor, imagery, in order to say, 'It as if it were like this," or "if it were like that." And so this gets us into the world of metaphor.
• 34:05
  mysteries: And again, I think I grew up in a world where, like, the real linguistic access to God is through discursive analytical language. And then, you know, figurative language or metaphors and other stuff, that's sort of like this husk and the kernel is the logical truth. But what I try to argue to the reader in the book is that metaphor is the way through to the true knowledge and love of God. So when God, Yahweh reveals himself as a shepherd, it's not as if God were incapable of more precisely describing the divine character as one who cares.
• 34:43
  mysteries: Well, if Yahweh had wanted to say, "I care," he could have said, "I care." Jesus reveals himself as a shepherd. It's not like he's like, "Well, I don't know what to say. I'm just sort of this in the prison house of my own social, cultural little world. And I'm not metaphysically talented enough to say it, you know, in better language, so I guess we'll just settle for shepherd." It's that metaphor contains sort of a host of associations and all of them are able to exist within this resonant coherent space all the same time in non-competitive terms are saying, God is a shepherd in the sense that, yes, he is a gentle one who will go after the one over the 99, or leaving the 99.
• 35:34
  mysteries: But there's also a sense in which ancient society the shepherd was a ruthless character. And so that rod and that staff, it's not baton twirling.
• 35:44
  Eddie Rester: So one of the things about the psalms that I think that you talk about is that just the soul searing honesty, and in a world sometimes that... One of the weird things that Christians do is that not only do we hide from other people, we hide... When people ask, they say, "How are you?" Our initial response is,"I'm fine," even if things aren't fine. But then we do that with God, too. We go before God in prayer, and we act like everything is just okay, God,"Hey, my life's great." But the psalms don't let us get away with that. When we pray the psalms, they really force us into that honest space. And so I guess my question for you would be, if someone wants to enter into that honest space with the psalms as a discipline, how would you encourage them to enter into that? Would it be, hey, do what Eugene Peterson said. Start with Psalm 1, move to Psalm 150 and just repeat, rinse and repeat? Are there other ways that you might invite people to engage the psalms?
• 36:49
  David Taylor: Yeah, absolutely.
• 36:49
  David Taylor: So yes, I would say Eugene's advice is pretty decent. So if the very least that you do is just begin reading Psalm 1 one day and Psalm 2 and get to the But I think if you begin with Psalm 1, I think it's really important to understand how crucial that first word"blessed" is. It's almost like, the blessing that is given to end and start over, I think that's great. And maybe you want the reader of the psalms is that there is a grace that goes before you. There's a grace that comes behind you, above and below you. So that as you enter into this world of opening yourself up to God and to the people of God in these honest, to read it in a translation that you don't normally read it in, vulnerable ways, which is scary to do that, because we're embarrassed. We're afraid of being judged and being found wanting. We're afraid of being misunderstood. We're afraid that God won't actually hear and answer our prayers. Those are very real fears.
• 38:14
  David Taylor: But understand that the entryway into the Psalter is blessed. So right. And so you can hear afresh. Or actually, some of my God speaks a blessing to us, grants us the grace. And maybe alongside of a few trusted friends praying the Psalms together, bearing witness to one another, even asking each other students listened. They listened to audio versions of the psalms, those scary questions, like "how do you really feel about God?
• 38:38
  David Taylor: Yourself? Your family? Your people? Your work? And might we discover language in the Psalms that enables us?" Well, I guess, as the title of my book puts it, open and unafraid, because that and that's great. You know, whatever can help you. And is such a gift to everyone around you, if you're able to be that vulnerable, that humble.
• 39:00
  David Taylor: But also, you know, even as we move our way through the psalter, and the first two thirds of the psalter is predominantly lament and we're moving towards an increase, sort there's a ministry called Streetlights, and they put the of the symphonic praise of creation, t never forgets where we have come from. And as I tell my students, Psalm 149, the gift of that penultimate psalm, is that it does this hard left turn psalms to music, to kind of hip hop beats. And so all kinds of ways.
• 39:25
  David Taylor: into lament and anger, as a way to say even as you're joining all of the cosmos, all of creation's praise, we don't forget that we live in this broken world, and we can still bring before God and others these deep heartaches and know that in Jesus, he receives them in grace and mercy.
• 39:45
  Chris McAlilly: Praise be to God. That's, I think that's a great place to set it down.
• 39:48
  Chris McAlilly: David, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for for writing about the psalms and then sharing with us today.
• 39:54
  Chris McAlilly: We're so, so, so grateful.
• 39:58
  Eddie Rester: [OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review
• 40:07
  Chris McAlilly: If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]