Monday of the Fifth Week of Easter
In his Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo describes God as “beauty ever ancient, ever new.” This is a realization that comes to us again and again as we deepen our faith. We find that God has a kind of newness about him; we experience the limitlessness of God. At the same time, we find God to be recognizable, consistent, faithful, and steady. In other words, we experience the oldness of God, the timelessness of him.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Jesus tells his disciples that the Holy Spirit will teach you everything and remind you of all I told you. The disciples will be taught (encounter the teaching of God as something new), but the disciples will also be reminded (the teaching will harken back to what they had already received). It will be like they are learning something for the first time, even though they are not.
God truly is ever ancient and ever new. Very often, when we receive an insight from the Holy Spirit, we are being reminded of something we already knew or we see what we already knew in a new light. For example, I always knew that the Church taught that the Eucharist was truly the Body and Blood of Jesus. But when I first read the words of the Bread of Life discourse in John 6, the doctrine of the Real Presence became new to me. The teaching on the Eucharist felt both old and new simultaneously. We can even re-read a very familiar passage of the Scriptures and something about it will grab our attention in a fresh way - it feels like we are reading it for the first time.
If God is both new and old, then that should give us all the more reason to approach him in friendship. God has all the consistency of a good friend because God is ever ancient and truly loving. God has all the mysteriousness of a person because God is truly personal and ever new. We cannot exhaust the wonder and goodness of this ever new God. We can therefore also trust God, because the more we learn of God - the more we are with God - the more familiar he becomes, the more we see that God, ever ancient and ever new, has always been here with us.