Time to Play Large

The Energy of Transition

"Fool & House", Pat B. Allen

For me the work of creating an embodied, creative Judaism is about inventing or re-discovering forms that teach us to experience the energy of transition, from sacred to mundane, from serious to light, from day to night in a new way. Transitions are the most powerful aspects of life whether birth or death or the constant mini-versions we go through in our daily transitions that are when most of us "fall off the horse" or make missteps in fear and contraction or just out of distraction. Everything we know is changing, enlarging, opening we are experiencing transition on the grandest scale possible. I believe we are being called to understand the Eros in everything, to broaden our understanding of the life force and to practice making a greater space within ourselves, body, mind, soul and spirit to receive more light. It is time to PLAY LARGE.

God Wants to Be Bigger
The way I understand this time we live in, God wants to be bigger, to break free of the limiting and constricting definitions, rules and rubrics that have been placed on God. Only those of us in bodies, by embodying a freer, larger space in ourselves can make way for more God-ness to unfold more humor, more life, more generativity, more justice, more love to manifest. We are the hands and hearts that manifest and reflect back to the Divine new possibilities. The Creative Process is a form of call and response to God from us and back again. The alternative is to contract in fear and try to reduce God back to an old, familiar and worn out definitions. This is the very understandable response that fear produces. We see it in our conservative political leaders and in the response of more fundamentalist religious thinkers. The attempt to go back to the past, to an imagined stability, is something we know in our tradition - didn’t the people complain to Moses and ask to go back to Egypt? We need to learn how to meet that response now with kindness, play and understanding.

"Fool & Flower", Pat B. Allen

New Spiritual Leadership
What excites me about this vision is that we are ALL in a planetary time of transition together and so the mix of energies is more potent and potentially deranging than ever before. We desperately need spiritual leaders who are skilled, adept, fearless and comfortable in the interstitial places. This is the sort of language I use to describe what I see and experience in the world right now. The chaos is necessary, a byproduct of old forms decaying, the ability to play, perform, try on different roles and hold everything lightly is crucial to making it through any transition. THIS is a, or maybe the, BIG one and so specially skilled leaders and guides are crucial, who can ask the question: “What else could this be?” That is the spiritual leaders who are here to jumpstart Judaism into it's next iteration of joy, gratitude and celebration, which will, I believe seed the justice we so need to bring to the world scene.


Pat Allen is an artist, writer and author of Art is a Way of Knowing and Art is a Spiritual Path and a member of the Hebrew College Rabbinical School Advisory Committee