When we talk of
building from the
ground up
this starts with building from the ground of our lives, in all their multiplicities.
We are often asking ourselves, where and what is the work of liberation. We sense that liberation requires more than our activism, radical thinking, or even our solidarities. It requires, first of all, the bringing of our embodied selves, and spirit.
As angel kyodo williams, tells us, “Patriarchy [and] white supremacy couldn’t survive if enough of us set about the work of reclaiming the human spirit”
A central part of our work is the labour of reclaiming and reviving the human spirit, holding spaces for inner reflection, mutual witnessing, and spiritual communality, as basis for political emancipation. If we are to shift power, we have to model shifts in ourselves as one of the ‘grounds’ of change. This means building from the ground of our deepest selves, our woundedness, and from the resources of possibility through and beyond wounds.
Looking at the world around us, we know many of our spiritual traditions are distorted by power imbalances, via colonialism, white supremacy, hetro-patriarchy. At the same time we recognise that secular liberation alone is impoverished in the absence of spirit, ritual, and connection to ancestry. The work of seeking this spiritual liberation is within a project we call “Decolonising Faith”.
Decolonising Faith is the space we are exploring at the intersections between spiritual practice and radical political and social transformation. It is the ground for an anti-institutional intertwining-faith dialogue that comes from the edges, the liminal spaces, the silenced voices. It is a dialogue of deep rootedness – deep into the soil of Cardiff where we are planted – and it is healing justice work.