I experienced one of my most emotional Christian experiences at a Good Friday service a few years ago.

I can't remember whether it was the song with the refrain "were you there when they crucified my Lord?", or if it was the hymn immediately after the sermon, but I remember starting to sob almost uncontrollably.

One of my friends in the congregation came up after the service to ask me if everything was OK. I felt a little uncomfortable expressing my emotions in such an obvious way, but it felt even stranger having to explain why I might have been overcome with grief as the Good Friday story was rehearsed.

Even on such red-letter days in our church calendar, I suspect many of us have a tendency to try and downplay our emotions. Many of us feel concerned that some sort of emotional nakedness might lead to a false sense of God's revelation or some other theological error.

Yet, Easter is about our grief turning into rejoicing. It's about a funeral followed by a resurrection. It's about weeping turning into laughter.

Perhaps our tendency to suppress our corporate emotions is an unfortunate by-product of the diminished role that the Psalms play in our church services. At some stage in the modernisation of our corporate worship we seem to have decided that the practice of the saints of the thousands of years before us were no longer relevant. The public reading of the Psalms ended up as collateral damage in the modernisation of our liturgy.

For, if many of our modern gatherings had a regular diet of Psalms, then perhaps we might have a greater corporate emotional intelligence?

Will you be ready to cry on Good Friday… and laugh on Easter Sunday?

Jodie McNeill is the Executive Director of Youthworks Outdoors and is planning to have Psalms publicly read at the TWIST Music Conferences this year.