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The year is turning. It’s possible to think of this moment as a chance to pause in what feels as if it has been a shouty, fractious political year. Tomorrow will be full of thoughts about a dry January, a resolution to get fitter or eat less meat or keep in closer touch with friends. But today is the old day before all the resolve of the new. What has this year been like for you? What have you learned, what have you lost, What have you celebrated and what are your regrets? How we deal with our past, both as individuals and as a society, is a key aspect of a process of maturing. And Christian spirituality has much to offer in this most human of dilemmas. Because the past is completely unchangeable. We are powerless in the face of it. Even what I said at the beginning of this broadcast has gone and is irretrievable. And so the question becomes not so much “what happened” but “how do I interpret what happened and how do I tell the story of it now”. History is, at its basic level, simply the attempt to narrate the past for the present, perhaps with a view to making decisions for the future. And so the same events, are presented by different generations differently, depending on what is happening at the time. How we will remember, for example, the process of the UK leaving the European institutions of the Union, due to happen at the end of March, is not possible to know. We’re too close to it now, living through it, making decisions as we go along. We don’t know how the story will be told in 10 or 50 or 100 years’ time, but what we can be sure of is that it will be different from what we’re saying now. Christian spiritual teaching encourages a bracing reflection about the past in the practice of confession. It’s an honest reflection on what we’ve done and how we have behaved, held within the presumption that God forgives, so we should forgive others, and, importantly, forgive ourselves. By making a life for the future, we have simply to give up all hope of a better past. Confront our own fantasies about ourselves and how it was; face life as it actually is. Try to tell the truth. For Christians, this will be to God. And then let it go. In the light of giving up hope of a better past, and accepting that we are the people we are, the great Christian theologian St Augustine gave good advice for any of us looking to the future. He wrote, during a politically turbulent 4th century. Pray as if everything depended on God. But act as if everything depends on you.