The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

Probably because of the hegemony of science in the US, we use “literal” and “real” interchangeably. One of the finest ways to foster spiritual growth is to learn to think symbolically. Our world has lots of scientists and most of them do good, but we are desperately short of poets and because we have few poets, we lack vision, and as the poet Osee said, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”