By Maxwell Grant
Sentinel Columnist
There is a lot of attention being paid these days to the ubiquitous presence of “pumpkin spiced” everything—soon enough, it will literally be the reigning flavor of the month, once again.
Our friends at Starbucks are particularly involved in this—each year, they’ve seen growth in the sales of pumpkin spiced latte, and so the “pumpkin season” has grown longer and longer, and been surrounded with greater and greater fanfare, until now it’s everywhere, even beyond Starbucks, and it’s beginning to receive some push back.
The pumpkin spice haters have started to organize.
Speaking only for myself, I will say that I feel a sense of regret for any pumpkin that doesn’t end its life as an actual pie. I will also say that, while coffee goes well with pie, I still think of coffee and pie as two different things.
But if there is some ingredient that makes the ordinary feel special, and if it helps you live into a particular stretch of days with deeper joy and connection, well then, God bless it.
For all its blessings and amenities, modern life has made us largely independent of seasonal rhythms, whether it’s the temperature of the air, the length of the day, or what part of nature’s bounty is now ready for harvest. We can enjoy days as long as we wish them to be, in rooms that are optimized for our comfort in every way, and with tomatoes from halfway around the world if a ripe tomato is what we require.
And yet, instead of making us feel particularly blessed, so often we feel like there is relatively little to look forward to—that our days blend into one another in ways that make us feel as we’ve hardly lived at all.
So if a pumpkin spiced latte is able to make us remember that the days are growing shorter, and the time to gather in approaches, and that what nature has on offer must either be claimed now or postponed for another cycle… well then, I’ll say it again: God bless it.
So as fall begins, may we be mindful of all the ways, large and small, that each moment is full of God’s sacred presence. Each day is a gift that has never been and will never be again, but which God decided that the Universe would not be complete without. Each day has spice, and a flavor all its own, if we will learn to taste it.
Blessings on our community in these days and in the days to come.
The Rev. Maxwell Grant has been the senior minister at Second Congregational Church since February 2012. He is a 2006 graduate of Yale Divinity School, where he was awarded the Mersick Prize for Preaching, and he was ordained in June 2007. Max and his wife, Liz Perry, an independent school administrator, have two daughters, Grace and Emily.
