Mike Nappa (MN) Thanks for taking time to meet today, Philip. Let’s jump right in. You mention in your book that you’ve had basically a life-long struggle with the Psalms. What happened to change that?

Philip Yancey (PY) Actually, the turning point for me was a year when I was unable to pray, frankly, at all. And I would try and it would just get so "fakey" and then there was no feeling of the presence of God or anything like that. So I went out and bought a Catholic prayer book.

MN: How did that help?

PY: [It] drew very largely from Psalms and so for that year, with very few exceptions, what I tended to do was say, "God, I feel unable to pray. So I ask you to accept this what I’m about to read as my prayer in my place because I can’t come up with my own prayers right now." And I would read the Psalms, and that was a really good exercise. A year is a very long time and I went through a lot of the Psalms! I was impressed by the quality of the writing, and also the richness and the variety. The very thing that had always created a stumbling block for me—because it seemed you could find a Psalm that covered anything—was the gift to me because I was in some of those situations I hadn’t been in before. And there were Psalms that covered those moods as well. So I think the turning point for me was when the prayers of the Psalms became my prayers. They’d never done that before. I looked at the Psalms as I read the rest of the Bible to try to find the proper theology, good content, what moral lessons can I learn from this. Don’t go to the Psalms for that. You go to the Psalms to find out a person passionately grappling with God of why the world isn’t like we want it to be. And it’s a great gift to us when we’re in that condition.

MN: You’ve mentioned before that the Psalms reveal an honest relationship with God. Do you think that there’s a point where we can go too far with that kind of brutal honesty?

PY: Well, no, I don’t. I think the only thing God cannot deal with is someone who shuts him out completely. And sometimes I have been in that state, like the little children who play the games, you know. They put their hands over their eyes and they think you can’t see them anymore, and that’s kind of how it is when we treat God like that. We put our hands over our eyes and say, "OK. You’re not going to be a part of my life anymore." But it just exposes how silly we are because if there is a God, then obviously He knows that as well. And what I learned from not just the Psalms, but a lot of the Old Testament, is that God can handle anything. You go and read the complaints of Job, Jeremiah, Lamentations—these are scandalous things, things that I would feel very nervous about saying. But God included them in his Holy Scripture. So I would simply say whatever the boundaries are, if you take the Old Testament as a guide, you’re further than I’ve ever reached.

MN: What do the Psalms teach us about dealing with life’s difficult circumstances?

PY: What I like about the Psalms is that it reflects the reality of my life, as well as the reality of the psalmist’s life. And what I learned from them is that it’s OK to take that disappointment, that anger, the rage even, to God and simply express it.

MN: Now when we express those emotions to God, is that what you call in your book "spiritual reality therapy"?

PY: Yeah. You go to any counselor for marriage problems, and the first step before you can get into any kind of cure is you’ve got to let out those things that have been bottled up for years. Only if you expose a wound to the air will it heal. And that’s true of emotional wounds as well.

MN: Do you think sometimes we’re too timid to share that with God?

PY: Well, yeah! And the churches encourage us to be, don’t they? I don’t know about your church but if somebody gets up and does a little reality therapy at my church, we’re shocked and we make them the object of gossip and we remove them from leadership positions. But actually, we’re all going through that stuff. And the Psalms simply give us permission to be open about it.

MN: What’s the best advice you’d give someone about approaching Psalms?

PY: The way I learned to read Psalms was by realizing what they are. They’re like somebody’s spiritual journal. I don’t think most of the Psalm writers thought, "Oh, I think that I will record my thoughts for posterity so that three thousand years from now, Philip and Mike can take these and grow." They weren’t thinking that at all. Just like you keep a spiritual journal, just like I should keep a spiritual journal, that’s what these Psalmists were doing…[The Psalms] aren’t concerned with telling us how to live and they’re not that concerned with revealing a systematic theology. They’re concerned with expressing a person’s soul as he tries to get along with God.

MN: What surprises did you find when you studied the Psalms in preparation for that section in The Bible Jesus Read?

PY: The surprise to me as I got to know the Psalms, is that about one-half of them are what I call "wintry Psalms." (I borrow that phrase from Martin Marty.) Only half of them are summery—bright and cheerful, sunny. Half of them are very morose. They’re negative. They’re melancholy. And I’m kind of that way a lot so I identify with that half.

MN: What does that mean for the average Christian?

PY: Not all Psalms are written for each one of us every day. They reflect the up-and-downness, the moods of life. The nice thing is they’re all there and they cover all those moods, so matter what we’re feeling you can probably find a Psalm that expresses that better than you could.

MN: So basically, we’re a multi-dimensional people and through the Psalms, we discover how God can meet us in every dimension?

PY: Yeah, great way of expressing it. [Laughing] I said that not Mike!

MN: Well, we’re just about done. Are there any last thoughts you’d like to share with our readers?

PY: The Old Testament takes more work, there’s no question about it. And it’s not going to hit everybody exactly where they are. Some people read Ecclesiastes and think, "What in the world is this?" Some people read Job and say, "Grow out of it," or whatever. But there will come a time, there will come a time in your spiritual experience when the nice cheery words in Ephesians don’t do it. They’re not enough. And at that time, the Psalms, the prophets, Job—that foundation, that under girding that Jesus had, that Paul had, that Peter had, that James had because that’s the only Bible they had growing up—that foundation is what you fall back on.

MN: So don’t neglect the Old Testament because some day you will need it?

PY: You’re going to need it. Yeah. You are going to need it.

•••