Who had no room at the inn?

In preparing for a Christmas Eve service this year, I found myself re-reading Luke 2:7.

Now we have all heard stories of Mary and Joseph wandering around Bethlehem looking for a room... and finding none until a friendly innkeeper said "I don't have a room, but you can sleep with my animals!" Or something like that.

But the verse is much simpler.

scripture4all.org gives a very good literal translation of a Greek text, and I assume it's one of the accepted texts.

And/she-brought-forth (gave birth to)/the/son/of-her*/the/"firstborn"/and/swaddles/him/and/"cradles"/him/in/the/manger/"because-that"/not/"there-was"/to-them**/place/in/the/"caravansary"

Words in quotes are idioms, I think... "caravansary" is actually 'Down-loose' for example... sort of like 'fleabag' might be hard to translate...

But the two interesting things are marked with asterisks...

*of-her Why is this not 'of-them'? Perhaps it is reflecting the subject (her) or perhaps Joseph is not in the picture. Also, the possibility that it was not his firstborn child exists. (the/son/of-her*/the/"firstborn" = her firstborn son)

**to-them "For there was no place for them in the inn", or so we learned in church. But who is 'them'? I always assumed it was Joseph and Mary, but the previous verse says, essentially "while they were there", not "as they arrived." This implies that they had had space to stay already, rather than going door to door pleading.

If we make 'them' be Mary and Jesus, then there is another simple interpretation. There were no private rooms in those days, and a woman giving birth is not only noisy but also ritually unclean. Instead of staying in the (crowded) women's hall, making everyone ritually unclean, Mary and sympathetic women might have moved to the stables, where her screaming would not disturb folks (as much), and the blood etc. wouldn't get on people. Oh, maybe Joseph was there too... we don't know. I also don't know if there was a 'women's hall' in the inn... just a speculation.

So there may have been space at the inn, just no space "FOR THEM" inside... where "THEM" is a woman actively giving birth.

There is a tradition that Jesus never cried... (except in the verse where he wept) but there is no similar tradition that says "Mary gave birth silently." At least I don't know of that tradition.

We do know that Joseph and Mary worried about ritual cleanliness, see 2:22.

That's my observation for today!

The spillway takes the pressure off New Orleans levees

Today (5/15) I had off work (I worked yesterday) and so after a very nice nap, I decided to go see the river. The best place to view the Mississippi is just north of the Bonnet Carre Spillway, in Norco, LA.

In the image above, the Mississippi is on the right, and the normally dry spillway is on the left. it leads to Lake Pontchartrain.



The scale of the thing is hard to photograph... each hole is pretty big.



I tried to capture a photo of the fish trying to swim UP to the Mississippi, but ran out of memory first.



This is the "Airline Highway" designed to be well above the bayous and a safe way to get out of New Orleans. The designers didn't expect 20' of flood waters from Bonnet Carre!



And a few trees seen from Airline Highway.

Locally, everyone seems to be on edge. The big debate was the opening of the Morganza Spillway, north of Baton Rouge, which will flood houses built in the Atchafalaya floodplain, but take pressure off the New Orleans and Baton Rouge levees.

Unlike the surge from Katrina, the Mississippi River's water is well above sea-level, and could flood the entire city (and Metairie, where I live) to a greater depth if those levees fail. This includes areas that didn't flood in Katrina, like Uptown and the French Quarter.

So we have reason to be nervous.

The paper (nola.com) has articles about wildlife and how they will escape the rising waters. Friends to the west in Morgan City and Bayou Sale are behind levees, so they shouldn't flood, but sandbags are being filled anyway.

We have had a drought here this past month. I hope we get some rain, but not that much.

(update June 5)
The spillway is still open... though the river has come down a bit. We still have a drought.

More pictures of the spillway, this time closer to the lake (further north)

A few days after seeing the Bonnet Carre gates I had a chance to go up to Baton Rouge... so I snapped some pictures of the Spillway:


In front of me, Interstate 10, a long elevated roadway west of New Orleans.
On The Left, Lake Pontchartrain,
On The Right, The spillway!
(New Orleans approaches are almost all elevated highways, from the north, east and west.)


The water is flowing under the train tracks and under the highway.






Still very dry weather, which is good.

Poem

Today we had a silent retreat as part of the chaplaincy program. I wrote several poems, and I think this is the best:

I SEE YOU

I see you, said God
Hidden in a rock
As if it were so
As if a rock could hide God's shadow
Contain all the holy-
ness rolled up

And Moses, like my beloved nephew, ran round the other side to see.

King Arthur

Ok, yesterday I threw hundreds of dollars of stuff at people on the street... all clamoring for it to be thrown to "me me"... it was a fascinating experience.




Marching units!


Floats



And ME