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When I was a teenager, most of my world-view was constructed out of song lyrics – and the one’s I listened to were generally left wing and solidly atheistic. “It’s no good praying to the pristine altars” fired out Paul Weller in that 1983 classic Money-Go-Round. Real religion, he seemed to be telling me, wasn’t something floating around up there, but solidly down here. “I don’t think he was an astronaut” Weller concluded, “I must insist he was a socialist.” He? Could he possibly be talking about Jesus here, I thought to myself – that he wasn’t some kind of celestial sky-pilot but more a political agitator. Yes, perhaps that was the point. Forget all that up in the air cosmic stuff, proper religion was how you treated your fellow human beings. And Weller wasn’t alone in making this point. In that very same year Billy Bragg sung these brilliant lyrics that always make me chuckle. “I saw two shooting starts last night. I wished on them, but they were only satellites. It’s wrong to wish on space hardware. I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care.” In other words, human love trumps astral fantasy or projection. At this time of year, Christians celebrate the feast of the Epiphany. Wise men – possibly astrologers, not kings – looked up into the heavens and followed a star until it came to rest over the place where the child Jesus was born. Epiphany is the wow moment of religion; it’s the bit where wonder and astonishment break through to the everyday. And for many of us, our first fleeting sense of this – often when we are even younger than teenagers – was to lie on our backs at night-time, stare up at the stars, and marvel at the immensity of space and time. This is often a kind of early religious experience, a sense of the unfathomable vastness of things, something that can raise the question of our place within the universe, of what our lives are for. These days I want both experiences. Desmond Tutu – God rest his soul – was the kind of Christian many people warmed to because he was very clearly a people person, a Christian who cared about the material and political conditions of his fellow human beings. But he was also an epiphany kind of Christian, he was full of wonder, at the beauty of the world, at the scale of that extraordinary dimension of things that he knew as God. These aspects of his faith were not in competition, but come together in the person of Jesus, where heaven and earth collapsed into the fragile frame of a human child. No, not an astronaut, not space hardware. Or Christians, this is the dawn from on high that breaks upon us. And why the songs I now sing to myself have very different lyrics. "Word of the father, now in flesh appearing". Happy Christmas everyone.