Tim: Your metaphor of poetry as "a wide church" is apt. It's no coincidence that much religious teaching is through parables, symbols, and metaphors -- and our religious beliefs often seem thin when expressed directly. The way of knowing we get in parable and metaphor is indirect, necessarily indirect, because the point is for us to be engaged on various levels: intellect, emotions, viscera. The poem becomes part of our experience; it IS an experience, much more so than a mere lesson can ever be. So I think that complete understanding (no, the illusion of complete understanding) can work against the greater meaning of a poem.
I often try to get my students to hold off trying to paraphrase a poem until we've spent some time with it. Otherwise, their tendency, often, is to reduce the poem to a phrase that would fit on a bumper sticker: "Slow down and smell the roses," "People handle grief in different ways," "Gee, I guess my father loved me after all." Paraphrase can be a substitute for understanding, maybe even a way to dodge something unsettling, although it may be unsettling simply because it doesn't reduce to a bumper sticker. And that brings us back to religion...
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