Growing up, a favourite stop on
family road trips was a little town named Coombs, located on Vancouver Island.
Packed into our Lilliputian red Subaru four-door, and generally afflicted by a
combination of road trip agonies (including the middle-seat engine hump, the
gradual shellac of gum wrappers to knee and a variety of cries ranging from
“You’re my faaaaavourite sister!” to “Coleslaw’s a fascist regime!”), all
discord in the back seat was immediately forgotten as we pulled off the Highway
4A and a great cry arose:
“Goats!
I see the goats!”
“Goats
on a roof, goats on a roof, goats on a roof!”
“Goats!”
Yes, there are goats on the roof
of the
Old Country Market. When Kristian and Solveig Graaten built the market
in the 1950s, they decided to include a sod roof—an energy efficient method of
construction common (at the time) near Kristian’s original home of Lillehammer,
Norway. Once the grass started getting too long, someone had the bright idea of
“borrowing” some goats to keep it mowed—and they’ve been there every spring and
summer since. They wander around on the roof, munching grass and generally
being inordinately fascinating (I lost more than one ice cream cone in my life
to being distracted by those goats).
These goats wandered back into my
mind recently while studying Evagrius Ponticus’s topic of logismoi. Greek for the word “thoughts”, over the centuries the
word has come to mean thoughts and mental distractions that come to lead us
away from Christ—quite often at the point where one is trying the hardest to
pray! In his Praktikos & Chapters on
Prayer, Evagrius divides them into eight general categories of gluttony,
impurity, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory and pride, and says that
every distracting and disquieting thought can find its roots in one of these
categories. Left unchecked, these thoughts wander all over in our mind, chew up
the energy we need for prayer and good works and generally distract us from our
destination—that is, God.
Thus, I’ve unofficially dubbed
the logismoi “the thought goats.”
Don’t get me wrong, I love those goats on a roof. But what if, on those childhood
goat-and-ice-cream stops, my entire family was so fascinated by those goats
that we forgot our destination (Tofino, beaches, camping, the ultimate goodness
of S’mores), the basic necessities required to get us there (gas, food, water,
bathrooms, sunscreen, endless games of “I’m thinking of an animal”) and perhaps
even tried to climb onto the roof to get a closer look at the goats’ wanderings?
Consequences could have ranged from annoyance and delay to actual danger and
the end of our trip together.
So, too, with the logismoi and trying to follow Paul’s
exhortation to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17). The point of this is not to try to stop thinking
entirely—that would be absurd. But, as Ecclesiastes says, “To every thing there
is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven”—and the monastic
schedule makes some of those times really clear! Figuring out ways to use
spruce tips in cooking, or pondering a metaphor for a poem, or wondering if it
would be better to plant carrots or bok choy in the garden are all valuable
uses of the discursive reason—but if I’m munching on them in the middle of
Adoration, it’s a pretty good sign that I’m following a thought goat.
So, what to do? In the Praktikos, Evagrius says that “it is not
in our power to determine whether we are disturbed by these thoughts, but it is
up to us to decide if they are to linger within us or not and whether or not they
are to stir up our passions.” If each distracting thought, good or bad, is a
goat, then if I pay attention, it’s like I’m offering the goat grass and
inviting it to climb into the car with me and make a nice goat bed and maybe
come camping with me too. I’ve never tried to roust a goat from a Subaru
four-door, but I imagine that it’s pretty difficult!
I have tried (am trying) to roust
out logismoi—and from what I can see
from the lives of the Desert Ammas and Abbas, it’s a long fight in which
victory consists not in banishing all the logismoi,
but in not being disturbed and distracted when they do pop up. Various writers
have called this state apatheia,
purity of heart, recollection, interior silence or unceasing prayer, and
descriptions of how to reach this state are pretty much unlimited.
But for me, I’ve discovered a
simple and effective slogan to help me remember what I’m supposed to do: Don’t
feed the thought goats!
