Dear Gabriel,

The story of Jonah has much to tell us about jealousy and resentment. Jonah first doesn’t like the Ninevites whether they’re misbehaving or doing good and he gets his comeuppance.

How do we deal with regret? You can think of the prayer ‘Let just live one day at a time, remembering that yesterday is history, and tomorrow is another day’. A better way is to remember that we can’t remake time. We all know that time travel is impossible because we might change the past simply by visiting it. Equally if we had done one thing different in the past, it might have remade everyone’s present.

But if God exists, clearly He must be outside time, otherwise his life would be unbearably long and tedious. I don’t believe he knows the future or predetermines it. Like us, He knows only the past, otherwise He would have to predetermine countless millions of alternative futures. So the point of all this is that we have to be happy with the past as it is – our own and other peoples – and there should be no regret.

Today we were at the celebration of the restoration of St Peter’s Church at Stonyhurst. It is nearly two hundred years old, being built in 1835 shortly after the Catholic Emancipation in 1829. It could be said that it is only two hundred years old, not four hundred years old, but one can not reject it. Like everything else it is a necessary part of the past. We all are.