Josh sends greetings to Romania

Unell and Josh at the Mana Deschisa campus.

Excerpts from Josh's recollections of his time in Romania with Marshall and Mana Deschisa:

"I was at my parents the other day and somewhat cursing the black walnuts that unpredictably fell on my car when parked in the driveway. The tree only looks like a green, healthy tree a month or so of the year. The rest of the time it looks on the verge of dying as its leaves are half-brown and appear to be hanging on for dear life. The nuts come falling in autumn and they are encased in a hard casing that stain your hands if you touch them. The beauty of them, however, is that walnuts are considered a 'super-food', one of God's best creations for feeding us Mid-
West folks. Super high in protein and omega 3 fatty acids, along with being good source of vitamins B,E and magnesium.

It really makes me glad and excited when people I know are going to visit Marshall and experience Open Hand Romania. It oft feels like another lifetime that I was there five (or more ?) times. It also makes me think of guys like Unell (who I often forget the names of), who is in the picture I've attached. He is a guy who has a pretty awesome conversion-process. I'm not sure if he is with Open Hand anymore but if so, please tell him Peter Reynolds and I said "Buna!" As for the walnut tree, it was in thinking about Unell that made me reflect upon that difficult, but beautiful tree. Marshall has spent the past 12 years recognizing the 'walnut trees' in Romania. I love that about him and think I share a bit of it with him. My dislike of roses is connected to this, for they are so easily recognized as 'beautiful', yet really have much less to offer than those awkward walnut trees. Marshall has recognized the streets of Romania as the tree that litters its walnut seeds about and knows that the messiness of handling them is so, so worth the effort. Unell is one of God's best creations, I believe.....

Have a phenomenal trip and I look forward to hearing about it when you return,

Josh

OPEN HAND - Intentional Faith Community

Open Hand USA is an emerging catholic, missional and monastic faith community: 1997 -2009

Affiliates: Australia -Holland - Kenya - Norway -Romania -USA

Catholic implies a post-Reformation ecumenical embrace of the church in its numerous world wide expressions.

Missional can be summarized by a global focus on the good of the cosmos (world) with a desire to work for God's Kingdom in transforming love for all creation.

Monastic informs us of the ancient rhythms of intentional community and spiritual disciplines woven into the fabric of our relationships.

Emerging means just what it says - an ongoing process of discovery and formulation as we are continually informed and often surprised by what God is doing here and now in our journey of faith as an intentional community in Indianapolis.

C.S. Lewis reminds us that .....we are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. The Church is the Bride of Christ and we are members of one another. As Christians we are not called to individualism, but to membership in the mystical body. The very word membership is of Christian origin, but has been taken over by the world and emptied of all meaning. Today it refers to "members of a class or group" and this definition that stands for "particulars included in a homogeneous structure", is almost the opposite of what St. Paul meant by "members". Club membership consists merely of "units", not anything in the Pauline sense.

We can see how true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective by looking at a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog and cat are true members in the organic sense precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable and each person is almost a species in themselves. If you subtract any one member from the family you have not simply reduced the family in number, you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables.

Inherent in this kind of unity is a richness, a diversity and extreme differentiation of persons in harmonious union which we know intuitively to be our true refuge both from solitude and from the collective. This is real organic unity. The society into which the Christian is called is not a collective but a Body. It is in fact that Body which the family is an image on the natural level. Membership in this body is not a massing together of persons, because at the threshold we discover that the head of this Body is so unlike the members that we are summoned from the outset to combine as creatures with our Creator, as mortals with immortal, as redeemed with sinless Redeemer.

The sacrifice of selfish privacy which is daily demanded of us in the Body is daily repaid a hundredfold in the true growth of personality which the life of the Body encourages. Those who are members of one another become as diverse as the hand and ear. Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality. Our structural position in the Church which the humblest Christian occupies is eternal and even cosmic, and the Church will outlive the universe - everything that is joined to the immortal head will share his immortality. The collective is mortal, the individual shall live for ever. Amen

12 October 1492

"I went to sea at an early age, and there I have continued to this day; the same art inclines those who follow it to wish to know the secrets of this world....I have sailed everywhere that is navigable...Our Lord found this my desire very proper....He opened my understanding with his hand, so that I became capable of sailing from here to the Indies, and He set fire to my will to carry this out, and with this fire I came to your Highnesses." Columbus to the King and Queen of Spain

Leadership,Imagination & The Spirit of Adventure

"Consider," he said, "that you, as young architects are to be the pattern givers of civilization... you must be the way showers. As no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can rise no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves, to make yourselves in quality what your would have your buildings be?" Frank Lloyd Wright

28 Years later - October 3, 1981 - October 3, 2009

Love you lots! The wife of my youth - Ann, and our offspring - Nick, John, Peter, O' and Annie! As usual, your assignment is to stay out of control and go out in life and have more fun than you should....enjoy the challenge -cheers, DAD

Rabbi Jesus

"Define the hell out of yourself, or someone else will...." Rabbi Ed Friedman

Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap: An Icon for Meditation

The imagery of this icon draws on Aboriginal cave/rock art from ancient times. The Aborigines would put red dirt in their mouths and place their hands on a rock or cave wall and then spit on their hands until an outline remained of their hand. Much like graffiti is used by gangs today, the hand image would mark a territory for a certain tribe or group.

The interesting thing about this image is that it is not a drawing of a hand. The negative (pink) space forms the recognizable shape around the hand. We recognize the form of a hand in the “gap”.

The concept for meditation here is to take the original Aboriginal idea of the hand marking off territory and turn it inside out. At certain times in our lives, we aren’t as concerned with what we own and where we are, but where we’re going. I think the first prayer that pops into our minds is, “God, show me what to do and where to go.” Often a holy silence follows this prayer. At times, it can feel like there’s no response to this prayer. It seems like God could use a hearing aid. Maybe we didn’t word our prayers correctly. Maybe we’re on the wrong path and can’t even remember the way back to the path we branched off. Maybe the prayer is just us talking to ourselves.

What if we had the eyes to see the “gap”? Maybe God isn’t going to show you where to go and what to do, but maybe in your daily life you can see a void of love, peace and compassion in family and friends’ (even strangers’) lives. These are the areas that are crying out to be filled with the goodness of his kingdom. These are the shadowed areas that are in need of light. In this sense, the ability to “mind the gap” is a gift given to us—the eyes to see and the ears to hear a void that is calling out for the goodness and love of Christ. Therefore, “minding the gap” is the ability to see an area of need and acting on that need. Maybe then we can begin to see where our hand—a part of the body—fills in the void. We can then claim this small area for the kingdom.

So, if you are at a point in your expedition where you’re uncertain of which path to take—remember to “mind the gap”. It is one strategy for determining the way forward.