"Whoever can give the people better stories than the ones they live is like the priest in whose hands common bread and wine become capable of feeding the very soul."~Hugh Kenner
There is something unquestionably right about the metaphor, and something unquestionably wrong. This tension of "is" and "is not" gives the metaphor vitality and integrity. When the metaphor is corrupted into literal description, when similarity becomes identity, metaphor loses its dynamic quality and dies. Or worse, the literalized metaphor becomes, in Sandra Schneiders suggestion, "a cancer eating away at the religious imagination and creating pathological results."
Dominus Vobiscum
Br. Joseph, Obl. ULM