To Tell and/or To show

If I have a theme involving the phenomena of love, freedom, and evil in some way, I find myself debating whether I can best interpret the meaning of what I want to communicate by "telling" with the use of an essay, or by "showing" through the use of a short story. Many of the existentialist philosophers such as: Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus and others that I am familiar with did both. They articulated their themes with non-fiction and they expressed the same themes through fictional novels, short stories, and plays. I have been writing short essays for years, but have not seriously attempted to use fiction to express my meanings. The essay seems to be more of an abstract way of communicating in contrast to the fictional story which is capable of expressing the meanings of life concretely. But this is only true of high quality fiction which is uncommon. Concrete existence is charged with interpersonal activity such as body language, paralanguage, proxemics which is distance standing and other minutia that we are not always consciously aware of.