Jesus told the crowd: “All the prophets and the law prophesied up to the time of John and … he is Elijah, the one who is to come.” To understand what Jesus meant the crowds had to know their own history, how God had been at work in the past. A healthy spiritual life requires a similar kind of awareness of history. This is true of the Church (full of saints and sinners), the nation (with “liberty and justice for all” and with slavery and the genocide), and of us as individuals. A helpful spiritual exercise is to do a “healing of memories,” to look at the story of our life and find the ways God has been with us in good times and in bad.
