It has been a rough year for depression. I spoke to two different friends recently who are struggling with it. I’ve had trouble with it myself, though not as badly as in the past. Both these friends said that they have been fighting the feeling that life doesn’t  have a point. Death seems not only inevitable, but desirable as a release from the drudgery and failure of life.

Advent disrupts this drudgery. On the first Sunday in Advent we light the Prophets’ Candle, the candle that symbolizes the long years that God sent messages through the prophets, promising the arrival of a Messiah. Tonight I talked to the girls about prophets and prophecy, and read to them this prophecy from the Book of Isaiah:

⁶ On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine — the best of meats and the finest of wines.
⁷ On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
⁸ he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken.

⁹ In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the LORD, we trusted in him;
let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

Christians read such passages as a prophecy of Jesus’ victory over death in the resurrection. By conquering death, Jesus has promised that those who trust in him also will conquer death. I have always read these passages as a simple promise of eternal life. But after this week, I am seeing death not only as the dreaded end of biological life, but as a dark force that we struggle against. Death has always been the enemy; depression makes it a saboteur as well, a conspirator who infiltrates our own minds and souls and snuffs out hope.

Jesus came to lift the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the winding sheet that covers our mouth and eyes so we cannot see or breathe. His birth into the world declares the end of the numbing routine of drudgery and failure. God can break into the world. God has. Rescue and salvation happened at the cross, and we are not trapped in our disgust at ourselves or our disgrace before others.

Sometimes it is hard to live up to the hope we’ve been given. The enemy still exists, and still needs to be fought. We still die, and our brains and bodies still tempt us to surrender to it. My depression has a dark arrogance: it insists that my despair and my self-disgust are not mental illness; they are insight. If everyone else only saw things clearly, it tells me, they would despise me too, or they would feel equally hopeless. My depression insists that my failures are total and irredeemable, and that only by conquering insurmountable challenges will I change anything.

But Isaiah says something else. “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us.” Change does not happen through us, but through God, and my fight is not to solve the unsolvable; my fight is to trust.  Depression stands on one side, the Empty Tomb on the other. Some of us need to make the choice over and over again. So every year Advent returns, telling us again that even routines can be broken and redeemed, and God has reached into ours and shaken it all to pieces. If we listen closely, we can hear the shroud tearing in half, and the host of the feast inviting us to come out and share the meal.

Also, judging by my sitemeter report, many of you are still linking here to my old blog.  Oh, do be kind to a poor blogger and update your links.  It raises my Technorati score and makes me feel all successful.  You don’t even have to do much; just delete the .wordpress part of the url.  Easy peasy, and I will be ever so grateful.

See you over at the new place.  It’s really nice.  I promise.

Unfortunately, sometimes real comments from real people also get sent to the spam file by Akismet, and I have to search through the hundreds of fake messages if I want to find the missing real ones. I am tired of doing that.

So even though the new site is not quite ready, I am going to move to the new domain name, ToddledDredge.com. If you read this blog on RSS feed, go ahead and update to that address. If you link to me on your blogroll, please update that also.

I will have a new post up on the new blog tonight, and after a day or two, I will change this old blog to registered commenters only. If the new blog gets targeted by spambots too, I will have to introduce some kind of comment verification system. I know typing those jumbled words is a nuisance, so we will wait and see if the move solves the problem first.

Did you catch that use of the pronoun? Yep. I am pregnant with our FOURTH GIRL. Az the Husband was completely unsurprised. He expects all girls. He is a good dad to girls (and not all men are), so it may just be sensible divine economy.

You may be hoping that I will do another name game like I did during my last pregnancy, but nope. Since we are currently thinking this will be our last child (but not taking any permanent steps yet), I am using one of my favorite girl names. It’s all picked out and waiting for her. Wanna know?

Here’s a hint: it’s one of the moons of Uranus.

Of course, the reality is that the Bible is a kind of anthology of different literary genres written by many different authors across different centuries. And when we interpret it according to genre and cultural context, its portrayal of polygamy is not exactly positive.

Polygamy is actually a broad category, referring to any kind of marriage that involves more than two people. In the Bible, polygamy appears strictly as polygyny, the practice of one man having multiple wives at the same time. In the ancient cultures of the Bible, polygyny was usually the privilege of the rich. A wealthy man might be able to afford more than one wife, but it was never common practice.

The Bible never explicitly condemns polygamy except in the case of a man marrying two sisters (Lev 18:18 – something the FLDS practices anyway), but scripture nevertheless speaks negatively about polygamy, once literary form is accounted for. Here, in bullet points, are some handy responses for you the next time someone tells you that polygamy is “in the Bible”:

• Every time the Bible describes a family where the husband has more than one wife, the marriage is unhappy. The wives are rivals, not friends. The husbands are harangued, burdened or hated. In terms of the narrative, the misery of the marriage always seems to be the result of the polygamy. Examples: Abraham, Jacob, Elkanah, David, Solomon.
• The examplar marriages in the Bible are always portrayed as monogamous. Examples: Ruth and Boaz, Mary and Joseph.
• The creation of the first marriage in earth’s first paradise (Adam and Eve) suggests a one man-one woman paradigm for marriage.
• The extolling of romantic love in Song of Songs includes the expectation of exclusivity. The bride’s jealousy of the Beloved is not condemned as selfishness; it is instead a part of the celebration of love. She has a right to his exclusive affection. “Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. (Song of Songs 8:6; consider also 6:3, 7:10) A seal, in ancient near eastern terms, is a mark of ownership, the unique mark of a single individual. When the bride demands that she be set as a seal on his heart, it means she alone owns his heart.
• In the New Testament, the standards for church leadership include the unavoidable prescription that men be “the husband of one wife.” (1 Timothy 3:2)