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<\/a><\/p>\nRoss Douthat and PEG have been having a back and forth over the possibility of communion for divorced and remarried Catholics (part 1<\/a>, part 2<\/a>, part 3<\/a>), and my attention was caught by Douthat\u2019s discussion of the \u201cfirm resolve\u201d to turn from sin required to make a good confession and return to communion. \u00a0He writes:<\/p>\n To use a higher-stakes version of the professional case Gobry references \u2014 if you work at a job that by its nature requires grave sin for full participation (let\u2019s say, I dunno, you\u2019re a lieutenant for the Wolf of Wall Street in his salad days), and you make a confession of sin but have no plan of any kind to disassociate yourself from the business, your confession is by definition insufficient, and saying \u201cI do not have the will to stop defrauding people, Lord, but I pray to gain it\u201d is a sign that you should be praying and not communing.<\/p>\n The same logic, then, would apply to someone in an institutional arrangement that amounts to public adultery under the church\u2019s definitions. You need not have the\u00a0full<\/em>\u00a0desire to change (of course everything is grayer than a term like \u201cperfect contrition\u201d might suggest), but the desire to have the desire is not enough: You need to have\u00a0some<\/em>\u00a0intention to change your life,\u00a0some\u00a0<\/em>idea\u00a0of alteration, to confess and commune in good conscience. And absent a significant shift in our understanding of the confession-communion relationship, the church\u2019s assumption has to be that people who are literally married to their sin do not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Douthat notes that, sometimes, there may be appropriate exceptions based on individual circumstances, but that formalizing rules for the exceptions is (a) practically G\u00f6del-hard and (b) likely to do more harm than good. \u00a0I\u2019m pretty much in agreement with all that. \u00a0But I do think the Church can offer more images of what \u201cfirm resolve\u201d looks like, and by so doing, invite more people to take whatever steps of repentance are available.<\/p>\n For example, Douthat and PEG both turned to examples of sinful situations that are very difficult, logistically and emotionally, to untangle yourself from. \u00a0But I\u2019m prone to repeated sins (I can think of a particular person I was habitually short-tempered and petty with) that don\u2019t result from any external force.<\/p>\n My children\u2019s tuition payments aren\u2019t dependent on my unkind thoughts; the stability of my home life doesn\u2019t rest on my rolling my eyes or gossiping, and yet I persisted in this behavior, without any reward by my own bitterness. \u00a0I went to confession, because I\u00a0did<\/em> recognize that my thoughts and feelings were ugly and aberrant, but I didn\u2019t have much of a plan for alteration. \u00a0I could pick particular prayers to try to interrupt the petty thoughts when I noticed them, but I had welcomed a logismos<\/em><\/a> and it had taken root.<\/p>\n My prayer didn\u2019t quite wind up being\u00a0\u201cI do not have the will to stop being contemptuous, Lord, but I pray to gain it,\u201d but it was pretty close. \u00a0I turned to an exclamation from Viola in Shakespeare\u2019s\u00a0Twelfth Night<\/em>, slightly modified.<\/p>\n O Lord! thou must untangle this, not I;<\/p>\n It is too hard a knot for me to untie!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Depending on the staging, Viola\u2019s lines can be a callous brushing off of her own part in creating this knot or pure confusion. \u00a0But I tend to like the Violas best who seem well-intentioned and overwhelmed. \u00a0They may not know where to start pulling on the knot, but they recognize that tangle of relationships and loves around her is a disfigurement of some better plan.<\/p>\n When I pray \u201cLord, thou must untangle this\u201d I am not disavowing my own responsibility, but I am asking for help in the work. \u00a0By myself, I can\u2019t stay out of sin, and I may be too mired to even make a good faith effort. \u00a0But I still want some small way to cooperate with God, in the hopes that it will lead me to greater unity and a better formed will. \u00a0In PEG\u2019s formulation<\/a>, my prayer sounds something like this:<\/p>\n A grace I often pray for is \u201cGod, make me want to do your will, and if not, make me\u00a0want to want it<\/em>, and if not, make me\u00a0want to want to want<\/em>\u00a0it.\u201d I often think of the oft-repeated prayer, \u201cLord, I do not know if my actions please you, but I think the fact that I want to please you pleases you.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I wasn\u2019t really up to a firm resolve to be kind, but I could maybe have some kind of resolve to not be terrible for at least one isolated incident. \u00a0In my case, one thing I ended up praying for was the opportunity to do the person I was wronging some very\u00a0small<\/em> kindness. \u00a0Something as small as picking up a dropped book or telling them the time when they asked. \u00a0Small enough that I could actually do it. \u00a0I asked for the grace to recognize this opportunity, act on it, and then to see it as the one\u00a0right<\/em> thing in my relationship with this person. \u00a0Think of it as a spiritual oil spot tactic<\/a>.<\/p>\n There are times when refraining from communion are appropriate, while we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, but the Church could do a little more to advise about the form that repentance could take. \u00a0I\u2019ve had friends, in similar situations of repeated sins, receive more of the \u201cstay away and pray\u201d advice, without very much guidance on what that prayer should look like. \u00a0Since the confessional isn\u2019t a counseling session, and relatively few parishioners participate in spiritual direction, the message some of them heard was \u201cCome back when you\u2019ve solved this. \u00a0Good luck.\u201d<\/p>\n Divorce and remarriage is the particular circumstance in the news, but, whenever someone is struggling with a sin that they\u2019re yoked to, by institution or by habit, it takes community, if not communion, to pull them out. \u00a0If you\u2019re denying one, all the more reason to make sure you offer the other.<\/p>\n