“If everything that was said had been done, then there would be nothing more to do.”
Osundolire Ifelanwa
The day was February 4th, 2022. The place was at my home, on the custom-designed square grid black dining table in the image below.
Ademola Tokunbo-Ishola and I were having a conversation about spirituality and the many unexplained/unexplainable contradictions we were facing in relating to an unseen godhead through inherited doctrines that were at best imperfect and questionable.
What started as a casual conversation became a full-blown exploration of existential and faith questions. Is God really out there or are we just marking time on a cosmic, endless evolutionary journey? Ademola and I were both raised as Christians, but as it appeared, there were huge contradictions between some of the things we were made to believe in faith and the hard evidential harvests of our intellectual curiosity.
How can a man die and live again? Is the recurrent theme of going to a better place after we die a Hope sales pitch or is heaven a real concept? Why were most religions exclusionary and non-accommodating of the possibility that their route to the divine might just be one of many?
At some point in the conversation, Ademola made a casual remark about how the topic of our conversation would make for an engaging podcast series and I agreed with him. We were at different stages of life — me approaching forty, he in his mid-twenties but we had the same questions. Questions that we believed weren’t just specific to us, they were the same questions others were asking too — even the most religious of us, who on the surface appear to have it all figured out.
That day, at that dining table, we agreed to start a podcast centered on the themes of faith and spirituality (as we understood it.) In our exploration of this theme, we promised to be honest with our feelings and allow ourselves to be vulnerable. We promised to approach the known and the unknown from a place of questioning, without fear of blasphemy or retribution. We agreed to be upfront with our doubts and not claim to know the things that we didn’t know.
Months passed and our separate lives slid into the torpid tedium of everyday living. I moved to another continent to start my life over and Ademola quit his first job in search of a more meaningful life. Then one day, one of us (whoever it was I can’t remember now) reminded the other that we were yet to do what we’d planned to do. And this challenge spurred us into action.
In one week of focused collaboration across the distance, we agreed on a name for the podcast, created custom artwork for the landing page, and recorded our first episode using software that enabled us to record separately and combine the audio tracks to feel like we were in the same room.
That is how Saturday Service was born.
We chose to call it Saturday Service because the theme and the nature of its presentation was our ideal vision of what church should be — an honest conversation between adherents of various faiths devoid of pretension and spiritual hierarchy. To us, spirituality was a personal pilgrimage undertaken alongside others with whom we share the same objective of searching for meaning. On this journey, no pilgrim is higher than the other. We are only different to the extent of our personal, intimate experiences with the divine. And by sharing these experiences, we can learn, unlearn and benefit from the collective wisdom brought about by the aggregation of our private revelations.
By May 2023, we had recorded 12 episodes of carefully selected conversational topics. While Saturday Service is yet to mature into the robust inter-faith conversation it will eventually become, it is a living testament to the power of collaboration in achieving set goals, and an acknowledgment of the immeasurable force of the spirit of doing.
I hope this inspires you (the reader) to visit your ideas graveyard and look upon the headstones of your stillborn dreams. Find those with whom you can share the light of your deepest passions and bring them back to life by doing. There is no time. Now is all the time we have and if anything is compelling enough to trigger our passion, now is the time to bring it to life.
This article is dedicated to all the listeners of Saturday Service and Ademola Tokunbo Ishola, my partner and co-pilgrim on this journey of finding meaning in a world where we are all in search of it.