Open and Unafraid Quotes

“What we find in these psalms of lament, it is important to stress, is never mere sadness. We find instead sadness before the face of God. For here there is never mere complaint brought to God, rather than kept from God. Here there is no victim mentality, even if the psalmist is a real victim of violence who requires vindication. Here there is wholly honest reckoning of pain within the community of those who seek to be wholly human, as hard as that may be, wrestling with God, not apart from God.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“We must pray who we actually are, not who we think we should be.16”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“What the psalms offer us is a powerful aid to un-hide: to stand honestly before God without fear, to face one another vulnerably without shame, and to encounter life in the world without any of the secrets that would demean and distort our humanity”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“Faith is not an individualist transaction between God and me. From the perspective of the psalms, the life of faith involves plenty of personal experiences, but they are never a matter of mere private experiences.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“No matter how great our fault or failure, we cannot sin apart from the grace of God.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“As the psalms see it, all of creation would instruct us in the practice of joy, if we’d let it. This is certainly what John Calvin thought. God, he believed, wants to ravish us by his creation, and by it, to ravish us with himself. “If one feather of a peacock is able to ravish us,” Calvin preaches, “what will God’s infinite majesty do?” If a hawk can ravish and amaze us, “what ought all his works do when we come to the full numbering of them?”10 Creation both exhibits the joy of the Lord and summons us to join its praise.11”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“A faithful life is not like a grocery list—something to get through as efficiently as possible. A faithful life isn’t simply reciting the right ideas about God. A faithful life is an invitation to contemplate God, to linger in the presence of God, to be with God, not just to do for God.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“And we must lament the brokenness of our lives now so we will be able to lament our broken lives at death—and discover that God’s grace embraces us here too.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“Doing justice and loving mercy make us vulnerable.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“The psalms demand that we live as citizens of God’s peaceable kingdom, and they invite us to enact the justice of such a kingdom. Justice is the way we make things right, put things back, give people their due in Jesus’ name.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“We do not simply vent or bemoan the tragic losses that daily mark our world; we also stand up for the poor, the needy, the widowed, the orphaned, the vulnerable, the alien, the stranger, and all who are oppressed.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“Christians should read Psalm 137, Volf argues, because it reminds us that by placing unattended rage before God, we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self, face to face with a God who loves and does justice. Hidden in the dark chambers of our hearts and nourished by the system of darkness, hate grows and seeks to infest everything with its hellish will to exclusion. In the light of the justice and love of God, however, hate recedes and the seed is planted for the miracle of forgiveness.18”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible; Thomas Merton, Praying the Psalms; Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer; N. T. Wright, The Case for the Psalms; or Beth LaNeel Tanner, The Psalms for Today.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“It is easy to be honest before God with our hallelujahs; it is somewhat more difficult to be honest in our hurts; it is nearly impossible to be honest before God in the dark emotions of our hate. So we commonly suppress our negative emotions (unless, neurotically, we advertise them). Or, when we do express them, we do it far from the presence, or what we think is the presence, of God, ashamed or embarrassed to be seen in these curse-stained bib overalls. But when we pray the psalms, these classic prayers of God’s people, we find that will not do. We must pray who we actually are, not who we think we should be.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“Thus it is, in the end, that the psalms might form us in the love of God if we would let them. And as Eugene Peterson reminds us, the love of God would open our eyes. In love, we would see what has been there all along but been overlooked in haste or indifference. In love, we would see that what has been distorted by selfishness can be seen truthfully, carefully. In love, all opportunities for intimacy would no longer appear as blurred threats on our alleged autonomy but rather become blessed invitations to know and to be deeply known.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“In the psalms the Lord is king. As king, the Lord stands sovereign over all of creation, sovereign throughout all eternity, sovereign over the nations and over the people of Israel. There is nowhere that god's justice should remain absent (Pss. 33:5-9; 96:11-13). It should be manifest at every level of reality - locally, globally, and cosmically (Ps. 97:6). Psalm 85:1-11 articulates this comprehensive vision of justice:
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace [shalom] will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“But for the psalmist, it is not simply that God cares about the abstract idea of distributive and retributive justice; it is that God loves justice. Psalm 37:28 declares, "For the LORD loves justice; he will not forsake his faithful ones." Psalm 99:4 proclaims, "Mighty King, lover of justice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“The psalmists see structural injustice within society, where Christians, perhaps especially evangelicals in the West, may see only personal guilt. The psalmists see wickedness that pervades institutions and cultures, while Christians may see only the need for the forgiveness of individual sins.

The psalmists see powerless people who are oppressed by the powerful, and so they pray for justice (Pss. 37; 82; 11); Christians see only Psalm 51 with its plea for mercy. Writes C. S. Lewis, "Christians cry to God for mercy instead of justice; they [the psalmists] cried to God for justice instead of injustice."

It isn't that mercy and justice are opposed in the Psalter; they belong together intimately, integrally. But while many Christians give justice half the attention they give to mercy, the Psalter devotes twice as much space to justice as it does to mercy. This is not because mercy matters less than justice but because a world that violates justice violates God's fundamental purposes for that world.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“But for the psalmist, reality demands that we use the language of enemy to describe things truthfully.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“In the Psalter it is not just "heaven and earth" that rejoice in God. It is also human beings and human bodies that rejoice in God. More pointedly, it is not just hearts that leap for joy in the psalms, it is bodies too: the mouth, the throat, the lungs, the hands, and the feet. All throughout we find the language of "shouting," "bursting," "reveling," "resounding," "clapping," "thundering," "crying," "exulting," and "dancing." These are not internal and invisible words; these are body words, physical and expressive.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“As the psalms see it, all of creation would instruct us in the practice of joy, if we'd let it. This is certainly what John Calvin thought. God, he believed, wants to ravish us by his creation, and by it, to ravish us with himself.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“Yet here, in the dust, in lowliness, a window of hope opens up for the faithful. For if it is from the dust of the earth, the adamah, that God forms our primeval parent, Adam, then it is also from this place of divine creativity that something new can be born. Carroll Stuhlmueller remarks, "Silently lost in adoration within the dust before God is preparation for the ultimate answer to all questions: one's becoming a new creature in Christ Jesus."

The dust, under this light, becomes good news for the faithful. In Christ's economy, things do not die without reason; they die in order to be resurrected.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“And while poets are "always telling us that grass is green, or thunder loud, or lips red," as C. S. Lewis once quipped, they are also always telling us that green is more than merely green, thunder more than simply loud, and lips exceedingly red. This is another way of saying that the world is more than just empirically classifiable stuff. It is wonder-full stuff. It is stuff that deserves our precious time and our loving attention. Poetry slows us down enough to give God's world the attention it deserves.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“In seminary I discovered the poetry of the psalms. Eugene Peterson reintroduced me to poetry, as I might be reintroduced to an old friend whom I had once feared but I could not enjoy in a companionable way. Poetry was for everyone, he reassured me. Like prose, poetry was part of the furniture of God's world. Like prose, again, it required work to grasp it. But it was also important to remember that poetry could do things that prose could not, and without it, as the psalms see it, we could not be fully human.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“One of the most striking things about these lament psalms is that they include the interrogation of God. This, as it turns out, is a divinely approved form of address.4 Psalm 121:4 confesses that the Lord is the one who neither sleeps nor slumbers but watches over us. But in Psalm 44:23, the psalmist dares to say, “Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever” (NIV). Here, the psalmist sounds like Elijah, who taunts the priests of the god Baal: Shout louder! . . . Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened. (1 Kings 18:27 NIV) Is this the way one speaks to the Maker of heaven and earth? Is this how you talk to the Holy One? Is this how we ought to address the Sovereign God? According to the psalmist, the answer is, at times, yes.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“Ellen Davis says something similar when she writes that the psalms “enable us to bring into our conversation with God feelings and thoughts most of us think we need to get rid of before God will be interested in hearing from us.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life

“For the psalmist there is no autonomous spirituality. There is only a faith that is lived in the company of God’s people.”
― W. David O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life