The Epiphany is a feast of light. No biblical scholar would think that the story of the three wise men and the star is literally true. But that doesn’t mean it is totally untrue either. Facts tell us truths about the external world but only fiction can tell us truths about the inner. The story is telling us that stars are especially wonderful in their glory and very special in the way that they lead us to God. Never has this been more true than now, when astronomers are revealing cosmological wonders to us so great we could previously never have even imagined them. It is as unthinkable that all the material atoms in the stars just happened to meet up with each other and just happened to form the elements that they do, and are not the expression of a prior immaterial ordering agency (we really do need to avoid the overworked and widely misunderstood term God so far as we can), as to think that the notes in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony just happened to meet up to form the symphony. Still less that the glory of the symphony could be anything else other than the expression of the glory that was first created in its creator’s mind.
