A 'first Friday of the month' series, from October 2024.

Personal stories of engaging in silence by practitioners from the Global Majority Heritage (GMH) community.*
A quarter of the way into the new millennium the reality for many people from this community is that their lives and stories are sidelined. Their voices are silenced. 

So, although people from the GMH may have a spiritual practice of silence, authors in these communities tend to write more about silencing than silence-based prayer. 

This new series is a way to bring some voices from the GMH community into the conversations and resources that Seeds of Silence offers on its website.

The idea for Voices from Silence came from Rosie Benjamin, its first contributor.

October 2024:
​Rosie Benjamin,
'Ways to Belong'

Image: openverse.org
​
Rosie Benjamin, UK
Listen to Rosie reading
​ 'Ways to Belong'

Ways to Belong

Maybe there are a thousand thousand different ways to belong. Or maybe there’s only really one. One, with a thousand different names. But where do you find your belonging in turbulent times?
 
Where do you find it on the dawn after the Brexit count and a man spits in your face, exultant, that now he and his mates can shove you and your kind out of his country?
 
Where do you find it when, in the second decade of the 21st century, those iconic red buses of London are branded with the slogan ‘Go Home’ and the only faces that are stopped and questioned at stations are the ones with the same hue as you?
 
And where do you find your belonging when surrounded by a hate-filled crew who are determined to do you harm, with their words and their weapons? In that infernal moment, lasting no longer than a few blinks of the eye, you are petrified, you are furious, you weep. You rage at a slipshod God. Then you fall silent. You reach down into the deep waters of silence because this is all you have, and besides, your tongue and your legs won’t move. And an extraordinary thing happens, and you are not, at first, a willing participant in it. Love happens. In the spaciousness of silence, and the narrowness of the now, the love that has rooted and grounded you all your life, explodes. You are overwhelmed, and shocked, with love for your tormentors. And one by one that shadowy crew leave. Love is revolutionary. Maybe, that kind of love is too hot to handle, and silence was the rocket needed to penetrate the darkest, hardest places of those human hearts. Maybe silence was the eye of that storm allowing the whirlwind of love to devastate and recreate.
 
Maybe there are a thousand thousand ways to belong. Or maybe there’s only truly one. But what silence does, deep silence that is, tunes you into a voice – the divine voice. A voice that you may hear even in the most disturbing of times. A voice that says:
            Rest. Be still. You are mine. You belong.
​Rosie Benjamin, October, 2024.

​* The term 'Global Majority Heritage' (GMH) is increasingly used to refer to people whose backgrounds are from non-Western, non-White ethnic and cultural groups, reflecting the fact that the majority of the world’s population comes from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The term seeks to challenge the traditional framing of racial and ethnic minorities by emphasizing that these populations are, in fact, the global majority.
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