“Good poetry doesn’t try to define an experience as much as it tries to give you the experience itself, just as good liturgy should do. It tries to awaken your own seeing, hearing and knowing. It does not give you the conclusion as much as teach you a process whereby you can know for yourself. It does not “overexplain and destroy astonishment.” Jesus does the same, particularly with the parables, and even says so at both the beginning and end of his parabolic discourse (see Matthew 13:13, 51–52). That’s why the long standing language of religion was poetry, aphorism and sacred storytelling, never merely prose or linear doctrines.”