Back in Jerusalem

Sorry for the "radio silence." Here's the story.

Last Wednesday our merry band of priests headed down to Bethlehem. To make things a bit easier, I left my laptop in Jerusalem, and took only my iPad. However, it seems Blogger/Google--the company that provides me a free platform for this blog, did not believe my iPad was in Palestine and Israel. So when I attempted to sign on and post about my wonderful experiences in the birthplace of our savior--and then the same thing happened in Nazareth and Galilee, where he grew up and had so much of his ministry. But Blogger (pbui) does recognize this laptop. Now that I have my laptop back, I'll try to fill in some posts about my adventures for the past few days.

But I can't do much tonight, however. You see, my laptop needed charging when I left it behind, and I didn't charge it while gone--because I didn't have a converter. (They don't use the same sort of electrical outlets here as we have at home.) I bought one in Bethlehem, however, so now I have one and I'll charge it later. So I have only a few minutes before the battery goes into a coma.

One observation on my excellent adventure (so far). One of the priests who is leading this project--I dubbed him El Jefe--gave an excellent talk last week about the specialness of the Holy Land. And he made the point that the key word is "hic"--Latin for here. That is to say: all the things we profess in our Catholic Faith? Happened here. Indeed, as we have visited so many places where the God-Man walked on earth, the Mass prayers include hic. The birth of Christ here; the incarnation here (in a cave in Nazareth), and so forth.

Tomorrow we go to the hill country of Judea, where our Lady went to visit Elizabeth and Zachariah after she consented to the Incarnation. More reports to come.