In praise of pumpkin spice

'Tis the season for cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and cardamom. (Mmmm.... cardamom...)

With that first brisk autumn breeze, we begin to crave the warming spices that will support our bodies through the challenges of winter.

Our bodies pretty much know what they're doing.

The pleasures of taste and smell are true responses to real goodness. Cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom have long been used for immune support, and nutmeg is winter-wonderful for an entirely different set of reasons. The research is fairly sketchy (who on earth thinks half-drowning exhausted rats is a good way to study mental health??!!), but apparently I'm not the only one who finds nutmeg encouraging.

Science has yet to provide anything really definitive about these potential benefits, but the tantalizing bits of information that we do have are enough to make me take these cravings seriously.

I've been revisiting Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and once again, I'm astonished and delighted by the powerful clarity of his categories. This time around, though, I find myself vehemently disagreeing with much of what he puts into those brilliant categories.

For Aristotle, appetite is fundamentally irrational. In this view, the virtuous person is the one who has learned act according to reason rather than appetite.

There's a very large grain of truth this. Unchecked appetite leads to disaster, and reason can set us back on the correct course.

But it can go the other way, too. Sometimes we reason badly, and sometimes our bodies know things that our minds haven't figured out.

All of our senses are lovingly designed to respond to truth. And all of our senses are fallible. Each element of the soul is a necessary component of a finely-tuned system of checks and balances.

Thanks be to God, who gives us good gifts, and the capacity to delight in them!