Since I last wrote my column a very wonderful – joyful, beautiful – thing has happened to me: I have become a grandmother. It has been a long, frequently sad and sometimes tragic wait, but now I am the grandmother of the second most beautiful baby girl ever born. (Second because no one, even this glorious little person, can challenge my own daughter here.)

She is not a month old yet and already she has taught me several important things. The one I am most teased about is the sudden transformation in my beliefs about “social media”. Two months ago I would have seen Skype as a work of the Devil, breaking up silence and solitude and creating social demands of an artificial and frequently bogus kind. Now it is entirely clear to me that it is an angelic invention, devised through the generosity of God specifically for women whose grandchildren are in a different continent.

The first few times I Skyped the baby was asleep – then one day my daughter emailed and said: “She’s awake. Skype now.” And I did, and she was, and it was a moment of delightful hilarity: more than 3,000 miles dissolved instantly.
But another thing I have been learning – or perhaps been reminded of – is the astonishing wisdom and power of medieval narrative – or imaginative – theology, and how sad it is that modernity has decided to neglect this way of knowing and learning in favour of rationalism, “demythologising” and “staying with the evidence”.