For the last three years my 15-year-old goddaughter Louella and I have been sharing novels, music, and having long coast to city phone conversations in which we debate the merits of the post-religious zeitgeist to which she subscribes.
I remember her as a young kid of six or seven: a sepia-eyed cherub with Quattracento ringlets who loved nothing better than spending an hour in a church amidst the ceremonial hush and slightly breathcatching air of spent frankincense. She also liked to pray in earnest back then, and seemed to pull a sanctuary about her like an extra blankey at the mere mention of a thing called a god.
These days when I remind her of this she sounds fond of her younger self, like a poet who knows her juvenilia is both embarrassing and the first evidence of herself as a creature of talent. For her that religious infancy perhaps represents the credulous first steps on her journey to the higher truth of political responsibility and existential freedom.
If only the church could grow up like I have, I hear her say. We could solve half the problems of the world with that one long overdue coming of age.
Implied in all this — and remember that Lelly finds science as genuinely awesome as drums and bass — is that her own intellectual growth has been merely a Darwinian thing, that her tendency towards the beauty of passionate enquiry has evolved to its only plausible conclusion: atheism.
The big problem with this, however, and she'd be the very first to admit it, is that five days a week, and sometimes in her dreams and nightmares, she attends a 137 year old Catholic girls school, in which the razor-tongue of Jesus, and the ardent reportage of his four most widely read offsiders, gets every bit as much of a look-in as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Voltaire, or Don Draper.
She has been angling, or should I say, sardonically demanding, to be freed from what she perceives as the fossilised superstition and ritualised sexism of this salubrious Irish Catholic institution pretty much since the first day she arrived there.
But as her third year at the school wound to a close last year, and just as she'd pressed her point home persistently enough to warrant emergency meetings between her parents and the staff, she agreed to go around again for one last time, mainly because the prospect of waiting