From time to time my students have used the phrase "hidden meanings" in reference to symbolism and metaphor in works of literature. But when a writer uses a powerful symbol or a metaphor, it's not that meaning is hidden--it's that there is so much meaning that the reader cannot comprehend it all. When the Bible uses symbolism and metaphor in the Psalms, Isaiah, and Revelation, is it to hide meaning? No. The point is that the meaning is so rich and full and mesmerizing that we can't get our minds around it.

The other day I came across this quotation from Augustine Di Noia. I'm emphatically not a Roman Catholic, but I thought his words shed light on the richness of theological mysteries and in a limited way to the symbolism and metaphor used in literature and other art forms.

The crucial difference between the Catholic and common uses of the word “mystery” lies here. When the term is applied to divine realities, the mystery involved is by definition without end. This is not to say . . . that the things of God are permanently or radically incomprehensible and ineffable, but that they are endlessly comprehensible and expressible. Not darkness, but too much light is what we encounter here. That irritating conversation stopper, “it’s a mystery,” doesn’t mean that we have nothing further to say but that we can’t say enough about the matter in hand. The mysteries of faith are so far-reaching in their meaning and so breathtaking in their beauty that they possess a limitless—that is to say, literally an unending and inexhaustible—power to attract and transform the minds and hearts, the individual and communal lives, in which they are pondered, digested, and, ultimately, loved and adored.