world which bear deep emotional and intellectual power. Living symbols are poetic in that they condense wide ranges of meaning, presenting imaginative fusions and transfigurations of human experience, often allowing us to grasp the mystery of a veiled reality in terms of a visible and palpable reality. Symbols are polysemantic and participatory, taking us beyond the literal and the obvious. So in liturgy we encounter texts, sign-actions and symbols which interpret one another. Consider the paradigm,