Sketches in an Old Journal


























My camera retires. And I don't have extra cash to buy me another. But I do have in my old journal some of my studies in pen and ink when I was still in the seminary. I suppose they would do to bring in variety into my blog. So I scanned some of them in my All-in-One HP Deskjet F4185 printer (which I just learned to be no longer available in the market) and edited their set up on Adobe Photoshop CS3. Of course, I learned the ropes through photoshopessentials.com's tutorials and trainings for adobe photoshop.




Those sketches, I did while having a retreat at Villa Consuelo somewhere in Novaliches sometime in April of 1992. The retreat house was being ran by Augustinian Nuns (Order of St. Augustine) and our Retreat Master was the former Rector of the University of Sto. Tomas, the Rev. Fr. Norberto M. Castillo, OP, Ph.D.



One of the "mantra" (if that word is acceptable to my mentor) he gave us during the two-day retreat was this: A man who bears no hope has condemned himself as hopeless man. And a hopeless man is no man at all.

To him, the meaning of HOPE is not a luxury. It is the gift of seeing the unseeing. It is the resolve of loving the unlovable and the risk of believing the impossible. Through hope, we nurse the future by making it present.

N.B.
Tomorrow is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomasians are celebrating the quadricentennial foundation of UST as being the first university in Asia in grandiose way. I could not come. But in spirit and in truth, I break bread with my brethren.

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