Pumpkin Patches

Jesus said, "What is the Kingdom of God like? To what can I compare it? It is like a mustard seed that a man took and planted in the garden. When it was fully grown, it became a large bush and the birds of the sky dwelt in its branches."

Again he said, "To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch of dough was leavened." (Luke 13:18-21)

Today is Halloween.  There are pumpkins starring at us from many windows and doorsteps.  Their carved-out centers and grinning, toothed faces are hollowed out gourds having been eviscerated of their pulp and seeds.  Either eaten or planted these seeds don’t grow to be large bushes for birds of the sky.  

Nevertheless, they give us a reminder of the power of a seed that for pumpkins grow into majestic orange fruits.  Yes, they are fruits.  A pumpkin is a fruit because it's a product of the seed-bearing structure of flowering plants. Vegetables, on the other hand, are the edible portion of plants such as leaves, stems, roots, bulbs, flowers, and tubers.  

The Kingdom of God is like a pumpkin patch.  This I conclude because of Peanuts.  We all sit in a pumpkin patch to wait for the Great Pumpkin. According to Linus van Pelt, the Great Pumpkin is a legendary personality who rises from the pumpkin patch on Halloween carrying a large bag of toys to deliver to believing children. Linus continues to maintain faith in the Great Pumpkin, despite his friends' mockery and disbelief.  

The similarity is we sit in our patches, not waiting for toys, but for the Lord’s love and answers to our prayers.  Like Linus we have faith, but many of our friends do not believe and may mock us.

What follows is the New York Times article The Magic of Linus and ‘The Great Pumpkin:’ His unwavering belief in the Halloween deity has drawn me to the 1966 “Peanuts” special year after year. Oct. 30, 2019 by Rich Cohen.

(begin) Pop culture can feel like religion when you’re a kid, a shared set of heroes and poses, attitudes, moods and jokes. For my father, who was born in 1933, it was a tone set by the two Franks — Sinatra and Capra. In my formative years, which ran from the mid-1970s to the mid-’80s, my general outlook on life, though fueled by David Letterman and Bruce Springsteen, was anchored by “Peanuts,” the world drawn by the cartoonist Charles Schulz.

It was Lucy, Linus and Charlie Brown, a Job who suffered to soothe our suffering. It was a faith related via parable, the classic text being the 1966 TV special “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” The imagery and music were what first drew me to the show, which I encountered in rebroadcasts. Here, in the age of “Kojak,” was a planet made for kids, a planet without school and without parents, where the leaves of autumn turn into the sort of phantasmagoria experienced when you get too close to the paste.

But it was the story that held me. Next to its predecessor “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which culminates in the transcendent moment when Linus recites the annunciation to the shepherds from the Gospel of Luke, “The Great Pumpkin” might seem less profound — yet the show is the purest parable of faith I know. You believe not because it makes sense, but because it’s ridiculous.

The show’s producer, Lee Mendelson, and the director, Bill Melendez, built the special around an oddball of a comic strip Schulz had written years before. In that strip, Linus, an artist and the most sensitive of the “Peanuts” gang (and who carries a security blanket as a preacher carries a Bible), writes a letter asking for succor from the Great Pumpkin as another might ask for succor from Santa or Jesus.

Linus seems to be the only one in his group of friends who is a believer and seeks to achieve a state of perfect “sincerity.” Variations of this word are used several times; Linus seeks the most “sincere” pumpkin patch to serve as his version of Gethsemane, the garden outside Jerusalem where Jesus prayed on the night of his arrest. Linus believes his faith will be rewarded, in the hours before dawn, by a visit from the Great Pumpkin. The figure will hover over the patch as God hovered over the waters. (“Each year the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch he thinks is the most sincere,” Linus explains.)

It’s his faith that makes Linus a laughingstock, a figure of pity and contempt. If you believe deeply in anything, you become vulnerable and look foolish. And that, to me, is what “The Great Pumpkin” is about: the passion of Linus van Pelt, degradation and humiliation, refusal to submit.

The story opens with death and resurrection. Linus carries home a pumpkin, which his sister, Lucy, cuts and guts, causing him to scream, “I didn’t know you were going to kill it!” A festival meant to end with the ascent of a Great Pumpkin has begun with the execution of a regular pumpkin.

Linus is mocked as he writes to the Great Pumpkin: “Everyone tells me you’re a fake, but I believe in you. P.S. If you really are a fake, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” When his Lucy and the others go off to trick-or-treat, Linus enters the wilderness of the pumpkin patch, where he will spend the night in a kind of prayer, seeking to achieve the kind of honest belief that will summon the spirit.

Only Sally joins him, but her motive is not pure; she is doing it for the object of her affection, Linus, while Linus is doing it for his god. In the end, she too betrays him, leaving him chattering in the cold, waiting for what will never arrive.

Lucy retrieves her brother at 4 a.m., leads him home and puts him to bed. In one of the most tender moments ever captured on TV, she takes off his socks, for only when the feet are free can the spirit rest. Though Linus has been disappointed and his god has not risen, he sleeps the sleep of the righteous. It’s the same sleep as that of the fisherman at the end of “The Old Man and the Sea”; he’s spent and the sharks have devoured the marlin, but the prize was never the catch. It was the quest, the effort and the suffering.

In the final scene, Charlie Brown tries to console Linus about his wasted night in the pumpkin patch by saying, “I did a lot of stupid things in my life, too.” This enrages Linus, who vows to find an “even more sincere” pumpkin patch next year. Experience is no match for faith.

For many viewers, the special might offer a pagan vision. Schulz himself, who taught Sunday school and clearly drew on Christianity in constructing the scenario (Gethsemane, death and resurrection), didn’t shy away from this interpretation. As described in David Michaelis’s biography “Schulz and ‘Peanuts,’” the artist once responded to a letter writer by agreeing with her assertion that the Great Pumpkin was “sacrilegious.” His intent, he wrote, was to use the pumpkin deity as a metaphor for Santa Claus.

John Updike dismissed “The Great Pumpkin” as “travesty if not blasphemy.” Not long ago, I came across a sermon online that used the special to demonstrate the fate of those who worship false gods. Linus follows a nature god instead of Jesus, and look where it leaves him? Chattering alone in the cold.

According to the sermon, “Linus’s belief is one of the most common beliefs about religion: It does not matter what a person believes in. As long as they are sincere in their belief, the object of their faith is irrelevant, and their faith is legitimate. Because the Great Pumpkin never shows, Schulz, simply and brilliantly, communicates sincerity is worthless if the object of faith is false.”

But to me, the sincerity in “The Great Pumpkin” is key and is what has drawn me to its magic year after year. It’s what you believe but also the sincerity of that belief that can give your life meaning. Sincere belief can order an otherwise formless succession of days, and it is meaningful days, collected together, that add up to a meaningful life. (end)

Consider this Linus quote: "Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He's gotta pick this one. He's got to. I don't see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there's not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see."  Yes, hypocrisy prevents the Great Pumpkin from appearing.  Jesus didn't like hypocrites.  Sitting in our patches we had better be sincere.

Deacon David Pierce