Pumpkin Spice Lattes and Final Causality

Don Your Flannels and Make for the Eternal Harvest Feast

Recently I kicked off my participation in the new liturgical season of Fall with a ritualistic batch of pumpkin muffins and some homemade pumpkin spice coffee creamer. Though I enjoy these treats, I cringe at such seasonal capitulations, thinking that an enlightened and educated critical thinker ought to see through the nonsense and reject all things pumpkin in an attempt to distance from the obsessive masses. But what if the cultish return to pumpkin spice has more to say about human nature than that we are merely gullible and obsessive consumers? What if PSL’s instead speak to our liturgical desire and a longing for an eternal harvest banquet?

With each year, corrupt corporations (and even small mom and pop shops) ramp up their marketing for a plethora of holiday and seasonal food, drinks, and decor. We, the passing consumer, continue to gobble them up, willingly entering the consumer culture. I think that our collective willingness is multifaceted.

First of all, we buy because the culture says we must buy. The ads are that good. We don’t want to miss out. We want to try the new pumpkin spice ramen noodles and the cinnamon pumpkin spice garbage bags.¹ We stumble across them unsuspectingly and are intrigued by their novelty and absurdity. Even when we resist buying them, we still pause just long enough to roll our eyes at those who do fall prey to the marketing.

Perhaps it isn’t the marketing that does us in. Perhaps we drive to an apple orchard or cave and buy an apple pie because the tradition has been ingrained since childhood, and the ritual connects us to our past. This is a sweet and nostalgic reason to pour yourself a glass of spiced cider, but as charming as it may be, I think there is yet another deeper reason we love these seasonal rituals.

You see, we love the tradition and ritual of finding the perfect jack-o-lantern pumpkin and decking our house in cornstalks because we are liturgical beings. We are made with a yearning for grandeur and seasons. From the very beginning we find ourselves in a world with night and day, with days of work, and days of rest. In that perfect Garden, before sin, there was ebb and flow, seasons and meaning. From the start, Creation has been imbued with cyclical patterns to feed us, literally and spiritually.

When the harvest comes around, we cannot help but feel a little flame awaken within us. Nature’s bounty stirs us to rejoice at Divine Providence. In our whitewashed modern lives, we may think that we are buying a pumpkin latte in isolation, removed from the dirt of the garden. But we buy a pumpkin latte only because of The Garden. We yearn for the harvest because we are made for the harvest.

We all ache for The Garden. It is where we are meant to be. Each trial in our lives today stems from that first separation of man and The Garden. With natural farming techniques, rugged hikes, organic gardens, pet succulent plants, and Audubon guidebooks, we attempt to return to The Garden. But we never will make it back in this life. Try as we might, we have traded The Garden for sin and pride. But this is not the end. There is a new Garden, a new Feast.

Perhaps the Wedding Banquet will sparkle like a fresh spring morning. Or astonish like the abundance of luscious summer greenery. Or instead, it might shimmer like a pure white snow.

But maybe it will be tables laden with the harvest feast that call us home.

1. I thought I was being facetious, but nope, both pumpkin ramen and garbage bags exist.