Ep 88 - Listening to the Morse Code of God

In this episode, we reflect on Jesus’ promise of the Holy Spirit as our Advocate — the quiet but powerful presence of God guiding, strengthening, and defending us in the midst of fear, self-doubt, and uncertainty.

Drawing from Harry Potter, St. Ignatius of Loyola, and a remarkable story about Morse code, this reflection explores how easily we can miss the subtle promptings of the Holy Spirit when our lives become too noisy and distracted.

The Spirit is always speaking. The question is: are we listening? ✨

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to episode 88 of Brother from Another Father as we celebrate the sixth Sunday in Easter. The renowned author J.K. Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter series, took the world by storm and captured people's imagination, both young and old alike, in a way that we hadn't seen since JJ Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories. What is it about these great epic stories that attracts us so much? I think what attracts us to the enchantment world that has been created by these authors is that we are fascinated by the prospect of a world where there is more to reality than meets the eye. We are fascinated by the notion that perhaps we are living in a world that is charged with magic, if only we knew how to access it. We pity the muggles, like Harry Potter's aunt and uncle, Vernon and Petunia Dursley, because they live in such an ordinary and boring world. They live such mundane and unexciting lives. Their lives serve as a foil to Harry Potter's existence, which by contrast is packed with adventure, intrigue, and excitement. The good news of our Christian faith is that we do indeed live in an enchanted world. The world we live in is enchanted with the power of the Holy Spirit. We can have access to spiritual power that will transform the way we live our lives and fill us with the joy of the Lord. And this is what our gospel is telling us today. In today's Gospel we see Jesus telling his disciples that when he is gone, the Father will send them an advocate. Now, just as today, so also in Jesus' time, the advocate was someone who helped you during a court trial and stood beside you and testified on your behalf. Sometimes, though, if the advocate was an important and powerful enough person, he did not even need to say anything in order to be of help to you. His presence alone was enough to simply make the charges go away and your opponent to give up. Once your opponent saw that you had the support of such a powerful and important personality, they would realize that their case was pointless, and they would decide not to proceed with their accusations or claims against you. It would simply be enough for your advocate to appear behind you, standing at your side, to scare away your opponents and enemies. Now I know this is not a great image of justice and fairness, for it suggests that your fate depends on who you know, but we need to recognize that in Jesus' world, the world of ancient Palestine, this was a world of patronage, of little people and big people, and an old end did depend on who you knew. If you had big friends, your life was made easy. Jesus is inviting his disciples to think about the Holy Spirit as a big friend, as a powerful personality who stands beside you all the time, not necessarily saying anything, but tipping the scales in your favor. So often we forget that the Holy Spirit has our backs, and we trip, we crack, we break. We think that the chips are stacked against us and we cave in, giving in to fear, giving in to self-doubt, giving in to temptation. When that small voice in our heads whispers that we are not good enough, that we are not holy enough, that we are kidding ourselves, that we have it all together. It is helpful to remember that our advocate is just a prayer away, but so often we don't turn to our advocate, and the enemy of our human nature has his way with us. Saint Ignatius, in his rules for the discernment of spirits, compares the devil to a general who has laid siege to a castle and is looking for the weakest point in the castle to launch his attack from, those points at which we doubt ourselves, or allow ourselves to falter and think, after all, we're human, and we cannot be strong all the time. Those are the points where the general, the devil, launches his attack. But if on the other hand, Saint Ignatius says, we present a united front, an entirely strong and protected castle, the devil will think twice before attacking. It is of course humanly impossible to be on top of our game 24-7. There will be days when we feel washed out and unable to resist the attacks of self-doubt, depression, or temptation. It is on these days that it is vitally important that we remember that we have an advocate who has our backs and on whom we can call for an extra injection of strength and fortitude. To return to the metaphor that we began with, we are often like the Muggles who do not comprehend that the world is enchanted with the grace of God. There is a great story to illustrate this truth. At the beginning of the last century, one of the most desirable and attractive technical jobs was to serve as a radio operator on one of the luxury ships that regularly cross the Atlantic Ocean, like, for example, the Titanic. To hold this job, you had to understand the operation of the primitive radios that were available at the time. But you also had to master Morse code, which was a technical language of longer and shorter beeps that could be sent over the radio by which the ships could communicate with one another. On one occasion, one of the most successful cruise lines advertised a position for a radio operator. The waiting room for the line office where the interviews were taking place was filled to capacity. Over 50 people were waiting to interview for the job. They were talking to one another in voices loud enough to make themselves heard over the public address system, which every so often would announce that the interviews would soon begin. In the midst of this activity, a young man entered the room and filled out an application for the job. He then sat down by himself for a few minutes. Suddenly he stood up and went through a door marked private. A few minutes later, he returned with a big smile on his face and announced that he had been hired for the job. This caused one of the applicants to protest. Look, he said, we were here hours before you arrived. Why was it that you went in for your interview before us? The young man replied, Any one of you here could have landed this job, but you weren't listening. Over the PA system, there was a constant message being sent in Morse code. The message was this We desire to hire a person who is always alert. So if you hear this message, come immediately into the private office. I think this story illustrates how easy it is for us to miss the promptings of the Holy Spirit. If we are too worldly, then we will miss the Morse code of the Holy Spirit, gently prompting us to take the direction of trust and patience. We will try to force things to go our way according to our own short-term schedule and goals and calculated on our own worldly wisdom. We might even find ourselves like the men who turned up for the interview, exasperated and waiting for God's intervention that never seems to come. Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit has been speaking to us all along, but we have not been alert enough to listen. Living a life in the Spirit requires moments of silence and calm in order to be able to hear the promptings of our Advocate, who speaks to us in prayer in the depths of our hearts. May we find the grace to turn to our Advocate and to accept the guidance of the Spirit that Christ promises us. God bless and have a good Sunday.