In Via

The Pilgrimage of Advent with Carolyn Pirtle

• Verso Ministries

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We often think of Advent as waiting for the Lord to come, but perhaps we can also flip that image: rather than seeing it as waiting for the Messiah to find us, can we also see it as a journey for us to find the Messiah? This week's guest is Carolyn Pirtle, program director at the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. We look at the counter-cultural season of Advent, what it means to be in a posture of waiting, the work that happens in this time of preparation, and how we must train our eyes to recognize Christ. 

Joan:

Welcome to In Via, the podcast where we're navigating the pilgrimage of life. We are all in via on the way and we are learning a lot as we go. I'm your host, Joan Watson. Join me as we listen to stories, discover travel tips and learn more about our Catholic faith. Along the way, we'll see that if God seeks to meet us in Jerusalem, Rome or Santiago, he also wants to encounter you right there in your car, on your run or in the middle of your workday. Welcome back everybody.

Joan:

Welcome to In Via, the podcast, where we are looking at the daily pilgrimage of life, and over the last few episodes we've looked at a variety of things, especially looking at the Holy Land, given the current situation, but looking at different pilgrimages people have taken. And today I want to do something a little different because we are in the season of Advent and I'd love to look at the season of Advent as a pilgrimage, and so today I'm excited to be joined by my guest, Carolyn. Carolyn, welcome, thanks for joining us on In Via. Thank you for having me, and I always start our conversations with just asking our guests if they could say three sentences.

Carolyn:

If they could tell three sentences about themselves, what would they say just as a way of introduction Sure, so my current role is as the program director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy, which is in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. But I'm actually a classically trained pianist and composer and singer, so people often wonder how did you wind up in that role? I wound up in the place that I am because I was drawn to the beauty of the liturgy and I was really excited as a younger person to help enhance people's celebration of the mass through music. And so now in my work at the Center for Liturgy, I often integrate the arts into my work because I think they really help shed the light on the deep and fundamental truths of Catholicism and really draw people in in a way that a lot of times words or theological treatises just sometimes struggle to do. So it's a great gift to be able to do what I do, beautiful.

Joan:

I love that. I think in the church the evangelizing power of beauty, and Pope Benedict said that if anybody was going to be drawn to the faith now it'd be through the saints and through the beauty of the church, and I love that. I think a lot of times we think of that as the graphic arts perhaps, and the art of the church in that way, but to think of the great riches of the music in our liturgy. Thank you for your work in bringing that to our parishes. Both, I know, does a lot in kind of taking theology out of the ivory tower to the people right.

Carolyn:

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Carolyn:

So we describe ourselves as the bridge between the academy and the church, so we bring the riches and the resources of the university and we make those accessible to people working in parishes and dioceses and schools and even to families and parents trying to figure out how to pass on the faith to their children.

Carolyn:

And we really think of it as this two-way bridge right. So it's not just us kind of passing things along from that ivory tower that you mentioned of the academy, but we try to listen as much as we try to teach. And I know that in my work with parish and diocese and ministers I have learned so much about the challenges that people are facing as they're working kind of in the trenches of parish and diocese and ministry, and the real struggles that they're facing, but also the gifts that those things offer. So, yeah, it really is a wonderful sort of connection point where people can come and learn things and then take them back to their parishes and dioceses and where we come to learn from them just as much as we hope they learn from us.

Joan:

I love that you put it that way, because my background is in diocesan ministry for many years and there can be a disconnect between we know what we should be doing, or we know what we want to be doing and we don't have the resources or we don't have the knowledge or we don't have the personnel. And so to recognize that there is this learning that the academy can also learn from the parish life and the diocesan life, and to have that kind of give and take of grace of where are you, how can we help you with where you are right now, and so I love that. I love that we're talking about Advent right now, because I love the music of Advent and I think so often Advent gets passed over because of Christmas and I love Christmas music. Don't get me wrong.

Joan:

Like, I have this funny exchange with friends sometimes because I put off listening to Christmas music until deep into Advent and people are like oh yeah, but I love Christmas music and I want to say, oh yeah, and I hate it. Right, that's not the reason I put off listening to it. Right, it's a sacrifice, and it's a sacrifice that we put that off so that we have this period of waiting, but I love Advent music too and I think sometimes Advent music gets passed over because we rush into Christmas music. So, as we look at Advent, I think Advent's a countercultural season because we don't like waiting. Can you maybe speak a little to the riches of the liturgical life in Advent?

Carolyn:

Yeah, so all of the readings I want to say well, I guess most of the first readings throughout this entire liturgical season come from the prophet Isaiah right, and so Isaiah is often called the fifth gospel, just because Isaiah points us toward the messiah right. And so we are in a posture of waiting from day one of Advent, and so I think Isaiah really helps us, not only to. You know, there are two ways to accept that posture of waiting, right. So one way is to wait begrudgingly, like ugh, I'm waiting for a bus, or I'm waiting to board my airplane, or I'm waiting for Amazon to deliver my package in like 20 minutes, as opposed to you know how we used to have to wait for things, and so that's one way of waiting where it's just like this awful sort of burdened, anguished, annoyed waiting right. The other way to wait is, you know, the idea of waiting for something beautiful, when parents are waiting to welcome their child, right? I mean, that's ultimately what we're talking about but sort of tapping into that fruitful posture of waiting where it's not something that we just sort of begrudgingly resign ourselves to, but it's something that we actually we understand that this waiting has something to teach us and that there's actually a great grace in learning how to wait with hope and with joy and with acceptance, but a different kind of acceptance. Right, we don't control necessarily when things happen in our lives Like we like to think that we do. But you know, I get on an airplane and I just there's any, there's any likelihood that the pilot's going to come over the PA system and say actually we're not leaving and we have to be plane and you guys are. You know, you guys are going to have to wait a little while longer, and so I think it teaches us our own limitations, but in such a way that teaches us a greater reliance on God, a greater poverty of spirit. Right, like that's the whole point of cultivating a poverty of spirit is to learn that everything that we have is a gift and everything that we receive, we receive as creatures who are dependent on the Creator, so that I think those are the two postures that we can find ourselves waiting in. It's a real struggle, like I don't like waiting to board a plane any more than the next person, and I get really annoyed when there are people in front of me who can't find their boarding pass and like it takes maybe 15 seconds. But patience is not something that I'm good at, and I don't think I think as a society we've gotten really bad at patience precisely because we don't find ourselves in a posture of having to wait all that often anymore. Like, if I want to watch something, I can usually find it online in about five seconds it's often on a streaming service or if I want to buy something, I can have it ordered inside of five minutes and it might be there the very next day. And so I think you're right.

Carolyn:

I think this is a very. I think Advent, more so than perhaps the other liturgical seasons, is a season of contrasts, because I don't think in any other season we see such the stark contrast between the posture that the church invites us to adopt and the posture that society writ large wants us to adopt. There's this sort of frenetic consumption and materialism that we're just bombarded with right now, but the church goes dark right, like we use candles and we simplify the music and the readings all speak of waiting and penance and things like judgment, which we don't even want to talk about anymore. And all of this is for the sake of preparing us for the gift that we will receive with the incarnation and the celebration of Christmas.

Joan:

So yeah, I mean, you know, I think Advent we think of like, oh, Lent is a difficult season for people to wrap their minds around, but it really isn't, because our world does know what it is to sacrifice for something good. Right, we're intermittent fasting, right, like people exercise, people suffer for the good. And so I think Lent, our culture can even understand that penance, but this penance of waiting, like you said, especially since we become so used to not waiting for anything. Right, the days of dial up internet are far far, far away.

Joan:

Right, I can't even like when my internet's slow, I get angry and it's what, like a half, a second dragging right and so, and I think we celebrate Christmas earlier and earlier every year as a society and I don't begrudge people who want to put lights up and you know, but what is it? I think this, this time of waiting, has a purpose and I think we forget that that. And you talked I loved how you said fruitful waiting, because that implies that this waiting bears fruit, that there's this time of preparation, just like a woman yeah, maybe a woman wants to give birth after a month of pregnancy, but she can't because her body needs time to prepare right and the baby needs to grow, and that you need time to prepare the house. And so, in a very similar way, like this advent, there's a purpose to the waiting. We're not just waiting for the heck of it, we need it because it's teaching us something, and so I love how you talk about that fruitful waiting.

Carolyn:

And I think in the Northern Hemisphere anyway, we were lucky because the the seasons of the earth reflect the seasons of the liturgical year, right. So even our world, our earth, goes fallow, right? Or at least it should. We shouldn't be trying to force things to grow in the height of the winter season. And so, you know, the farmer has to wait, and scripture speaks of this also the farmer waiting for the early rains and the later rains, and there is something, so that that is also a fruitful kind of waiting.

Carolyn:

I grew up in Wichita, kansas, and you drive 30 minutes and you're in farm country, and so it's. You know, right now the fields have all been plowed and everything is very barren and very stark, but it won't always be that way. We just have to wait and we have to be patient for the time of growing and the time of, I suppose not just the time of growing but the time of visible growth, because hopefully there's always growth taking place. We just might not be able to see it because it's underneath the surface. So, you know, I think Advent is really that time of under the surface growth, and then, you know, we see the fruits of that later on.

Joan:

Yeah, like even land has to lie fallow, right, like I mean you couldn't grow something in Kansas right now and you shouldn't, and that's a good thing. Like that, things are still happening. I think of, actually, my Christmas cactus. It used to never bloom at Christmas and now it's blooming at Christmas and Advent, which is really exciting because it's so dark and dreary and South Bend, and all of a sudden we have this beautiful flower but the cactus looks dormant for a long time. That doesn't mean something's not happening in those little you know, and then all of a sudden it burst forth.

Joan:

Things have been happening the whole time, and so it's that, and you know, we of course unite ourselves with the Blessed Mother who, during this time, we had this secret right For so long, with maybe just Joseph, that the things were happening and salvation was coming. She's just the only one that knew how close it was, you know. And so I think there's so many beautiful themes in Advent with that waiting. I think sometimes we think of us going to find the Messiah Sorry, the reverse. We think of the Messiah coming to us right. Advent is this time of like waiting for Him to arrive. But our podcast is named in Via because we're all on the way in life. And so, you know, how is this especially evident in Advent, that we're all on the way. Like, how could we call Advent a pilgrimage when I think, sometimes we think the reverse, we think of Christ coming, but how you know, do you think you can look at the opposite of us going Sure?

Carolyn:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the whole Christian life really is a pilgrimage, right, we're all in Via, we're all making our journey home to God, right, and we don't know how long we have to make that journey. And so the invitation, I think, especially in Advent, is to be vigilant in making that journey and actually to be watchful in prayer and to be diligent about going out to meet the Lord. So, just before the Advent season began this year, we heard the reading of the 10 virgins, or the 10 bridesmaids, with their lamps right, and there's this sense of keeping your lamp trimmed and ready so that you can go out to meet the Lord, like that was the whole point of the bridesmaids they were to be ready to go out and welcome the bridegroom. And so that's the invitation for us. And you know, I think being on pilgrimage is so different from being a tourist, right, and I'm sure you probably talked about this a lot on this podcast but pilgrimage is very, very different from being a tourist. Being a tourist is almost like being a consumer when you go to these beautiful places. Being a pilgrim is opening yourself up to receiving what the place has to offer you. And so I think this idea of Advent, being a pilgrimage, actually really captures both this waiting for the Messiah to come to you, but also doing everything that you can to try to make that encounter happen, preparing yourself by seeking Christ's face in the poor.

Carolyn:

I think this is a time of year where people are really aware of the haves and the have-nots, and, you know, there's a lot of emphasis, in parish life at least, of charitable giving and attending to the needs of the people who are struggling, whether that's financially or materially or even spiritually. You know, how do we find Christ in those people, and I think that's where we can go out to meet. Christ is in the poor, and that's how we can really train our own eyes to see Christ in the poor so that we can recognize him when he comes at Christmas. And that's such an essential thing. But it's not something that's just relegated to Advent, right, that should be part of our practice every day of every season, of every year of our lives as Christians. And I think we need these seasons where we do place a heightened emphasis on those things, if only to remind us that actually, yeah, I should be doing this all the time. So I think that's one way in which we can really try to kind of go out and meet the Messiah, rather than just kind of passively waiting for the Messiah to come to us.

Carolyn:

And I think, actually, our Lady provides a beautiful example of this too in her visitation of Elizabeth, where we read in Luke's Gospel she goes in haste into the hill country to go and attend to her relative who's six months pregnant and elderly and needs help. And so, yeah, our Lady is the perfect example of someone who, you know, she has this radical posture of receptivity and that's why she can receive the greeting of the angel and give her consent and say let it be done unto me. But it's that same impulse that then drives her out right. It makes her realize that like, okay, this is happening to me, like if I were Mary, I would say this is happening to me, everybody needs to gather around me and administer to my needs. I'm bearing the Son of God, and that is like I shouldn't have to do my chores or anything. I should be able to just kind of take it easy.

Carolyn:

Mary does the opposite and that's why she's Mary and I'm not, and I have to loan for her, because she teaches me that when my impulse is to just sort of rest on my laurels or to just sort of take a step back and take it easy. In my spiritual life. There's always going to be someone who needs me right, and there's always going to be somebody that I can bring Christ to in the same way that Our Lady did. So, yeah, I think there's this sort of paradox of the season where, yes, we are called to wait, but we're also called to go out and meet the Messiah.

Joan:

Yeah, I think you can talk kind of about those. You talked about two different types of approaching waiting. You can think of two different types of waiting that passive or that active. You know, I mean we all know people who just kind of wait in their lives to be given a telegram by God to tell them what to do, right. Or you have the person who's active and like really seeking God's will and being like I'm going to do this and if God, if you don't want me to do it, close the door, right. There's these two different ideas of waiting and we see in the Blessed Mother this active, like I'm not just going to sit around and wait, I'm going to be active for the Lord, active for his will while I wait.

Joan:

And I love, in Advent, like putting ourselves in these different characters of the story and saying, okay, I mean almost doing kind of a lexiodivina with these characters and saying, okay, what was, what was Mary's? I love this like radical posture of receptivity right, what allowed Mary to do this and how can I imitate it? Or what. Like the pilgrimage of the shepherds, right, and so like to think of how the shepherds receive the good news and then went out and so like to put ourselves in these characters, I think can be really profound during the season that has so many great characters.

Carolyn:

Yeah, absolutely yeah, I think you're absolutely right. What I think is common to. So you look at Mary, you look at Joseph, certainly, and Elizabeth herself, and I think, even like Zechariah to an extent, I imagine that all of these people were so deeply steeped in the word of God that they were able to recognize God's activity when it was revealed to them. And so you know, so often in art, in scenes of the Annunciation, mary's reading a book, and so even before the angel comes to her, she's already pondering these things in her heart, as Luke says in his gospel, a couple of times actually. And so that spirit of pondering and contemplation, I think you know, even in the midst of awaiting, where we're not going anywhere, that's still a kind of activity that we can undertake. So say, for example, you know someone might be out there listening, thinking to themselves this all sounds great. I am caring for a parent right now who's homebound, or I myself have an illness that prevents me from going out and doing these acts of charity. You can still pray, you can still meditate upon the joyful mysteries of the rosary, perhaps, and put yourself into those scenes and imagine those gospel stories.

Carolyn:

There's a beautiful tradition of Ignatian contemplation. So St Ignatius of Loyola would often encourage his followers to place themselves in a particular story of the gospel and kind of watch it play out or be an active participant as it plays out. And so I think that that kind of meditative, prayerful posture is also, you know, that really to me encourages a kind of fruitful waiting, where you know you might not be able to go out and do the things that you would want to do this season because the circumstances of your life were asking something else of you. And that really means that God is asking something else of you right now. And so, you know, rather than kind of fighting against that and saying, oh, I wish I could do this, I wish I could do this, I think the invitation there is to look at your circumstances as they are, and not necessarily as you would have them be, and ask yourself, okay, what's God's invitation in the midst of these circumstances? And how can I practice a fruitful, joyful, kind of patient waiting, even in the midst of difficult circumstances?

Joan:

That's such a good reminder to us, such a good reminder that God sees us, god knows us, god's place these things in our lives for a reason and all of our activity should start with prayer, because it can be very easy to be active in this activism of I need to go out and help everybody without it coming from where it should right.

Joan:

We think of Mother Teresa, who started all of her work with time of intense prayer and when she felt like she didn't have enough time to do her work, she prayed more. And so all of like to all start in the scriptures, to start our day with the scriptures, to start that time of prayer with scriptures, and then our activity flows out of. That, I think, is such an important reminder. Yeah, as we kind of wrap up, you know we're looking at Advent as a pilgrimage and you are doing an exciting project that I think kind of connects to the idea of pilgrimage. At least I found it really helpful in my own prayer life to kind of travel the world from the comfort of my own home in this Advent season. Could you tell us about your beautiful crush project?

Carolyn:

Yeah. So the McGrath Institute for Church Life for the this is our gosh third, fourth year, fourth year of doing this we have started a digital Advent and Christmas crush calendar. So crush is another way of saying nativity scene and you know we've partnered with the Marion library at the University of Dayton Ohio. They have an extraordinary collection of nativity sets from all over the world. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we would bring around 30 of these nativity sets to the University of Notre Dame campus and we would sort of spread them out throughout the campus in different buildings, and then on a Sunday of Advent, we would actually gather a group of people together and make a physical pilgrimage through the campus to see these crushes. But then, of course, covid hit and we had to cancel the event. And so when that happened you know we'd been hosting that event for six years at that point and we had a really robust repository, like an archive of previous crushes that had been to campus, and so I just decided well, we're just going to do this digitally and we put together a daily email campaign and I picked, you know, a representation of crushes from around the world and we had all of these beautiful reflections that accompanied them from our previous exhibits. So we added a couple of pieces. You know I made up a few prayers that would accompany each day's reflection and it's really been remarkable to see how this has been taken up. You know when we would host the in person pilgrimage. You know you're inviting people from the South Bend community and you're lucky if you get 100 or 150 people there.

Carolyn:

Our first year of offering this calendar we had close to 2000 people sign up, and so for this year we're at 18, more than 1800 people, and they're all from all over the world, right? So we have these nativity sets from around the world, we have participants from around the world and everybody's just kind of making this journey together. And the great thing about this you know you talk about the musical distinctions between Advent and Christmas we keep this calendar going through the Christmas season because we recognize that you know we don't put the crush away on December 26. Like, the invitation is to continue contemplating the mystery of the birth of Jesus through the end of the Christmas season and even beyond that, right. But I think this is this is what makes it a distinctive sort of experience from the typical Advent calendar, which takes us through Christmas Eve, christmas day.

Carolyn:

With this opportunity, people have a chance to keep living Christmas throughout the Christmas season and to continue to return to the manger with the shepherds and with the, the magi, you know, and you talk about placing yourself in the position of the various characters of the Christmas story.

Carolyn:

I think this is a really beautiful way to do that, because that's what these artists have done right in in their own particular culture, in their own particular part of the world. They are telling the story of the birth of Jesus through the particularity of their own culture and their own experience, and so each of these crushes is so different, but they each invite us to encounter the mystery of the incarnation in a new way. So, you know, I I love being able to put this calendar together every year. It's kind of like getting to put together a playlist, which I've also put together, a playlist of Advent music for the McGrath Institute. So I'll have to share that with you. But yes, we can put it in the show notes, absolutely. So you know, we have these different things that can help sort of preserve the uniqueness and the specialness of the Advent season, even as everywhere around us were being bombarded with Christmas already.

Joan:

But yeah, I love, I've loved the calendar so far because it's so familiar to all of us. Right, the nativity scene, so tender, and to see it throughout these Catholic eyes of, to see a crush. That's so different than the one I have but is would be, you know, coming from, like you said, someone's experienced an own culture to remember the, the, the Catholicity of the church and the universality of the message of God, and that that God entered time, right, he entered space, he came to us the mystery of the incarnation as he entered this world. And now we all are using our cultural gifts and our backgrounds to celebrate that.

Joan:

And this year being the 800th anniversary of the nativity scene, and this is the great grace of getting to go to Gretcho, which is where St Francis invented the first activity scene so to speak, by placing himself and placing that town in in the nativity scene and they too have a huge museum of lots of different nativity scenes and just to kind of like reflect on how this comes out of everybody's spirituality in all the different cultures, and to make this pilgrimage yeah, and I think one of the things I really love too is, you know, this isn't just something that's restricted within the bounds of Catholicism, right?

Carolyn:

So some of the artists who created these pieces aren't Catholic. We have one in this year's calendar that was actually made by a family who practiced Buddhism, and so I think it just testifies to the power of the reality of the incarnation to speak to every heart, right, and that's what we see in the story of the Magi visiting the Holy Family, where they represent the Gentiles and everybody who is outside of the first covenant of the people of Israel, and that's us too, right, like that's, you know, all of us who have been grafted onto the tree. And so what I think is so powerful about these pieces is their capacity to serve as tools of evangelization, too, and to continue telling that story in a way that sparks a new encounter, sparks something deep in the imagination and really moves the heart. It's really beautiful.

Joan:

I always loved. I taught RCIA for a time. I'd be a guest speaker at times and I loved teaching our lady at Advent because everybody I mean everybody can relate. They don't like the fact that we have statues of Mary until Christmas and that everybody has statues of Mary and just like recognizing that if God became man he had a mother right and just that recognition again of that tenderness of God as a baby and that unassumingness of God as a baby and what that means in the incarnation. And that's a whole other podcast than this.

Carolyn:

It is because that makes me think of our Lady of Guadalupe too, who has this immense tenderness, and she is the pregnant virgin right when she appears to St Juan Diego and there's. I love that that happened at this time of year, like our Lady of Guadalupe appeared during the Advent season, and so I think you could do an entire podcast on just contemplating what she's trying to teach us by coming to us at this time of year. But you know we'll leave that for the moment.

Joan:

That's right, that's right. Well, as we wrap up, I am going to throw a curveball to you that I didn't tell you I was going to do, and I wondered if you had a favorite Advent hymn or piece of music that you could recommend to us as a musician, something that we could maybe listen to to get into the spirit of the season.

Carolyn:

Okay, so there is a piece of music and this is actually on that playlist that I mentioned, so I'll be sure to send that to you, but it's a piece I believe it's called it's one of the Stratfield Motets. I don't know if I'm saying that right, because it's Welsh. I think the composer's name is James McMillan. He's Scottish and is an amazing composer, has written for all sorts of things, but he's also written for his, like, little Scottish parish, which I think is amazing. But I believe the name of the piece is O'Radyant Don and it's one of the O'Antiphons that we, that we would pray starting December 17. Just the way that he captures the spirit of longing in this piece of music is, I think, just extraordinary.

Carolyn:

At one point the choir is singing altogether At the same time. They're singing different notes, of course, and creating this beautiful harmony, but they're just singing the word come over and over and over and over, to the point where you think this can't go any higher, like the Sopranos, can't go any higher like this. There's just this intensity and this build and I just think, like for me, it's a piece that really, really communicates the deep, deep longing that we're invited to embrace during this season. Beautiful, well, thank you.

Joan:

We'll be sure to put that playlist in the show notes as well, so that everybody can spend the last time of Advent really entering into the season before Christmas. Thank you for joining us, carolyn. This was lovely. Have a blessed Advent. Thank you so much. You too. Take care, god bless listeners. Thanks for joining and be sure to share this episode, especially with someone who might not recognize the beauty of Advent or even really know about Advent. It would be a great way to kind of share this beautiful season with them. Thanks for listening, god bless.

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Joan Watson

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John Paul Lichon

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