GOBBLING THE GOAT

“When the brothers came to Abba Mark to confess their sins, one said, ‘I have no great sins, Father. I have murdered no one, I have stolen nothing, neither have I committed fornications. All my sins are small ones.’ The old man replied, ‘The devil belittles our small sins so he can lead us on to greater ones. If I violate my fast eating a single pea secretly, someday I will violate it by eating a whole goat.’ ”-from The Sayings of Abba Mark the Greek

The devil doesn’t advertise. He does his best business on the sly, cut-rate, at bargain prices. He’d prefer it if we didn’t even realize who we were doing business with.

Hell isn’t principally peopled with Adolf Hitler, Don Juan and Caesar Borgia, but with the countless, nameless souls who came cheap, who traded eternity for trash. Mothers who teach their children to steal, husbands who abandon their vows for a new red sports car and a twenty-two year old floozy, the accountant who builds a business by shifting figures, the manager who browbeats employees just because he can. It’s not so much the Great Sins which damn us but the smaller ones we take for granted; the ones we think don’t matter, the ones we tell ourselves aren’t really sins at all. Most of us go to hell by baby steps, not giant leaps.

St Teresa of Avila, that wonderful Spanish woman with whom Someday I hope to spend an afternoon, says “God only shows us our sins as much as we can bear them.” If we could see into the cob-web corners of our souls, we might be driven to despair. “My own heart,” the Psalmist says, “shows me the wickedness of the ungodly.” I don’t need to look elsewhere for why the world is in the sorry shape it’s in. A mirror will suffice. I’m already eating the goat.

Abba Mark, like St Teresa, says that the sins we see are the ones we should deal with. Don’t worry about what you don’t know. Deal with what you do know and let God worry about the rest.

Fighting sin seems scary because we don’t know how to do it. We don’t do it by trying real hard not to sin, by trying to think about something else, by taking a whole lot of cold showers.

We do it without drama, without trumpets, in the secret place of the heart where temptation is trying to insinuate itself. We pray.

No temptation can overcome prayer. If we call on the Lord Christ, saying no more than “Jesus, help me,” He will. The problem isn’t that He won’t hear my prayer—it’s that I don’t want to pray in the first place. I don’t want His help—or interference. I may even tell myself “I can do this myself.”

Every time I do, I end up eating the goat. That’s because—even when I resist temptation by my own will-power (which any of us can do under the right circumstances)—all I’ve done is pushed aside a small sin to embrace a greater one. I, Me, by Myself, I turned aside the temptation to steal—I did it Myself. I resisted the pea of thievery to gobble the goat of pride.

Our spiritual lives succeed not when we win victories over the devil, but when we surrender to God.

We don’t have to beat back all the snarling hosts of Satan—as the matter of fact, we can’t. That’s God’s job. Ours is to find our place under His banner, put on the armor of prayer, and follow where we’re led.