Okay, for those of you who’ve stuck it out with me here for the past three weeks, we’ve had some serious Sundays together. We tackled repentance during the high holy days, had a very Biblical-centric sermon for world communion Sunday, and last week I talked about resisting fascism. That’s some heavy stuff and you’ve all approached it with grace and receptive hearts. And that’s all while surviving the high tourist season here in Salem, so y’all are due something a little more light-hearted. So in honor of October, I present to you today: the spiritual meaning of pumpkin spice.

Partly, this is selfish because I really love an excuse to think about the deeper meanings of pop cultural trends. You know those articles in the Atlantic or the New Yorker that are like, "White sneakers: How today’s teens are upending evangelical purity culture through their fashion trends,” Or “What the rise of gourmet donut shops tells us about our collective despair in the face of the climate crisis.” Those are like catnip to me, I read every one. Send them my way when you find them.

So I’ve been really fascinated with how fall got to be “Fall.” This complete obsession with everything autumnal feels new. Growing up, I remember back to school sales and halloween decorations but I don’t remember people basing their personalities around the season. I don’t remember anyone saying, “I’m such a fall girlie” or hanging up advent calendars counting down to sweater weather and spooky season. But now it’s everywhere. If you’re not perpetually online and haven’t been inundated with the memes and perfectly curated apple picking photo shoots, here is some data. Market analysis shows that the “pumpkin spice industrial complex” is a $1.1 Billion dollar industry. Revenue from agrotourism, like you-pick apple orchards, has tripled over the past two decades. (I see the tour team members out there getting ideas, adding up potential fundraising profits in their heads if we offer a coffee shop or plant some apple trees out here. They’ve got the Scrooge McDuck dollar-sign-eyes). There’s now a whole set of bestselling romance novels called “The Pumpkin Spice Cafe.” GIlmore Girls, a show that premiered 25 years ago, is once again back in the top 10 streaming shows, as it is almost every year in September and October, thanks to people who rewatch it every fall for the smalltown New England vibes. New Hampshire is hiring seasonal park workers to direct traffic at the most instagrammable fall foliage sites. And a private facebook group run by Starbucks, devoted to the love of fall, called the Leaf Raker Society, has 42,000 members. Its description jokingly reads, “This group serves as a forum where we constructively work together with Mother Nature to help Autumn arrive earlier in the calendar year.”

And while perhaps interesting, it doesn’t seem on its surface like something worth exploring in church. But I think our human longings and yearnings and the ways we try to fill those longings and yearnings is inherently a spiritual and theological topic. And clearly there is something we’re trying to fill by consuming so many lattes. It would be easy to just chalk it up to capitalism and commercialization, but while capitalist systems are often complicit in expanding the voids we feel, so they can profit off of filling them, there still needs to be a way in: a little crack or a small hole to exploit. So today we’ll attempt to answer, What is the spiritual void at the heart of #pumpkinspiceseason?

I did kind of an absurd amount of research for this sermon, so if you want a lot of facts about the history of Starbuck’s pumpkin spiced lattes or the labor theories of you-pick apple farms, find me at Fellowship. But one of the more interesting facts I discovered was that St. Hildegard, 12th century Benedictine abbess and medical practitioner, was a big believer in the spiritual benefits of a little pumpkin spice. French author Géraldine Catta, who has researched St Hildegard's herbalist practices, says that, for the saint, “joy is an essential reference point, a sure guide on the path to a healthier diet.” St. Hildegard considered a combination of nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon to be particularly beneficial. The saint writes, “This preparation softens the bitterness of the body and mind, opens the heart, sharpens the blunt senses, makes the soul joyful, and diminishes harmful moods.”

I found no evidence that the developers at Starbucks knew this history of St. Hildegard, but they nevertheless found a way to tap into her wisdom. The ancient wisdom of female folk healers and those who stay connected to the medicinal properties of the land. Hildegard, a declared Doctor of the church, understood that joy and comfort and the health of the soul are as worthy of our attention as any physical ailments. Something we can’t say for most modern medicine. Centuries later, Hildegard’s wisdom forgotten, Starbucks found this crack in our society and slipped inside. Instead of a return to folkways or a health care system that values a person's body, mind and spirit, we get overpriced lattes. We live in a world where marketing departments are more tapped into our underlying human needs and yearnings than our churches or public servants.

Beyond the ubiquitous Pumpkin Spice, psychologists think one reason people love fall is because as humans, we seek temporal landmarks, or “moments that create a structure for how we see and use time.” Like birthdays or New Years. Fall is a particularly potent temporal landmark. The back-to-school associations give the season a kind of “fresh start” energy and research shows it’s associated with improved motivation. Conversely but just as powerfully, it is also a season of death. The falling leaves a reminder that nothing gold can stay, to quote Robert Frost. And the autumn holidays of Samhain and Halloween and All Souls honoring the thin veil between this world and the next. Fall, out of all the seasons, seems to be the one that most visibly and powerfully connects us to a sense of time, to cycles of beginnings and endings.

We are in many ways living through an era of profound dislocation and disconnection. So many of the structures and systems that gave shape to our lives and grounded us in time are falling away. Like our connection to the land. We are a hyper-mobile society. Most of us don’t spend our entire lives on the same piece of land, where we can track the seasons and the passage of time by individual trees, the way Henry David Thoreau did on his daily walks around Walden Pond. We are no longer an agrarian society, where we measure time through cycles of planting and harvesting. And climate change means it’s hard for us to even know what seasons are anymore. Several authors and academics I read this week posit that we are fetishizing autumn more precisely because it is vanishing. It’s nostalgia for a season that barely exists.

Even our social temporal markers are changing. Church attendance in the US continues to decline, meaning most of us aren’t in tune with a religious or liturgical calendar with seasons of repentance, reflection, death and rebirth. Our changing economy and gig culture, with more people working multiple jobs driving Ubers or delivering food to make ends meet, means that the traditional workweek and weekend has less meaning. And where we used to have seasons of lying fallow, our current economic system expects the same level of productivity in late fall and winter as it does the rest of the year. Shorter days and longer nights are no excuse for not meeting Q4 numbers.

And lord knows we are disconnected from the most personal and visceral of temporal landmarks, our own mortality. We live in a death-phobic society that wants to reverse any sign of aging and keep any evidence of dying politely behind closed hospital doors.

In so many ways, we have lost our sense of time and place.

So we look for new rituals and practices to ground us, for ways to reconnect with cycles and seasons that honor the rhythms of the earth and the rhythms of our bodies. We are longing to return to ancient wisdom that our bodies and souls remember, but we can no longer seem to find our way there. So we reach for the lattes and the sweaters and the Gilmore Girls binges and we take the perfect picture at the pumpkin patch in the perfect boots and flannel. But I’m not sure we’re any more fulfilled. And we’re certainly not any more in touch with any kind of natural rhythm. In fact, the more we try to fill the void, the better business fall becomes, and the more incentive there is to stretch the season outside of its meteorological limits.

I hear many of you talk about how the Halloween season in Salem continues to expand on either end of the holiday. The pumpkin spiced latte is released earlier and earlier every year. Now arriving in August. So these things lose their usefulness as a temporal marker and now we have this double disconnection. Does it feel hotter in fall because of the climate crisis or because businesses are now insisting fall actually starts at the height of summer? It’s disorienting in a way that can mask the truth of what’s happening in our world. If we don’t really know when autumn begins and ends anymore, we lose our connection to the earth that would let us know our planet is hurting and we need to act. If we don’t know when autumn begins and ends anymore, we lose our sense that it’s time to let go, to rest, to let something die and return to the earth to make room for new life. It’s like the more we grasp for temporal markers, the more meaningless the seasons become.

We have gone bananas for all things fall because we are hungering for connections to place, time, the planet and community. And that impulse, that hunger is good and true. And the things we’re using to fill that hunger aren’t inherently bad. In fact, they’re often very good. Like the ancient, soul healing combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. But they aren’t enough when they’re disconnected from the deeper needs they represent.

So, I’m not going to stop anyone from ordering a pumpkin spiced latte, although I might encourage you to order it from a local place. The one I had a few weeks ago at Wolf Next Door was delicious. And I won’t discourage you from rewatching the Gilmore Girls. I just started season 2 last night.

But maybe don’t give Starbucks a monopoly on filling that spiritual void. Notice what it is you’re longing for when you reach for the trappings of fall and find ways to fulfill those longings that don’t further a sense of disconnection. Maybe the annual family trip to the U-pick farm becomes a year round plot in a community garden. Maybe the desire to take a picture with leaves crunching under your feet becomes a spiritual practice of contemplating mortality and cycles of death, decay and new life. Maybe the desire to drink an iced pumpkin spiced latte because it’s 85 degrees becomes an entryway into climate activism or volunteering with an environmental justice organization. Perhaps the desire to watch a TV show about a quirky small New England town becomes a desire to get more involved in civic life here. Whatever it is, let the lattes and the apple orchard trips and the cozy accessories be the cherry (or perhaps cinnamon dusted whipped cream) on top of a life lived in deep community, in right relationship with the planet, and with an awareness that there is a time and a season for every matter under heaven.

May it be so.

Amen.