I KNOW WHO I AM....

New Year's Day 2017

It's been a long time coming, they do say ‘Better late than never’ though.
I've always known I would blog about this at the right time, it was just a question of where to start. A quick read of my ‘About me’ on this blog opens with an introduction of myself as ‘Ola also known as Risi when I'm keeping in touch with my roots’. The roots I refer to here are my parents Muslim faith.

In one of my earliest blog posts 'Back To My Roots' I covered how my name morphed from ‘Risikat’ to ‘Ola’ and I spoke of how all my siblings are known by their Islamic names with the exception of me. My parents were (I can't believe I'm now referring to both of them in past tense) what I'd call moderate muslims.
My childhood memories of muslim holidays relate to the loooooong wait between my parents return from the prayer ground and when the ram was skinned, fried and stewed sitting in my plate besides a heap of jollof rice with the accompanying Fanta and nothing much more.

Likewise the month of Ramadan to me was just a month when my folk would wake to eat breakfast in the middle of the night and then again in the evening. My brothers and sister were just not involved. We were never required to fast though we'd eat our dinner with our parents when they broke their fast.  And that's very much how ‘The Sule Household’ rolled.

Dad’s mum was a Christian while his dad was a staunch Muslim, how that worked I really don't know. Christmas service in our home town was a long drawn out service, it felt like 5 hours, and was conducted in Yoruba and we  would hear the old women singing the hymns in Ijebu. Now you’d need to understand the Ijebu dialect to appreciate the irony of the Yoruba hymn  ‘Ose o Jesu a o ma yin o’ sang as ‘Ose o Jesu a o ma yin “wen’’ by these women😩

My mum came from The Kuku family of Ijebu-ode, predominantly Muslim.
So basically we had very fluid lifestyles where religion was concerned.

One day my parents decide that we need to have some purpose in our lives 🙄 and engage the services of a neighbour friend of theirs, Mrs Badero she was a Christian and an evangelist. That's how she became wait for it……..our Bible Lesson Teacher! Yep you read right ‘Muslim couple engage services of Bible lesson teacher to teach their children’. That's how once a week she’d come over to our house for an hour and share the word with us, afterwards she’d just be jisting with my parents. I think this is called religious tolerance if I'm correct.

I do recollect that there had once been an attempt by dad to engaged the services of an Islamic scholar to teach my brothers unfortunately it was way too late 😩, my brothers ran circles around this poor man with their questions, frustrated him and wound him up till one day he got annoyed and said he can't teach them anymore and that was the end🙏🏾 My siblings were SU’s for as I long as I could remember and my parents attitude was very much ‘Do you…but just make sure you do something’ what they would not have was one living like a plant, growing daily with no purpose. You either go to church or mosque one of the two.

I have a cousin with a Muslim name he's a Christian, he meets a lady he really liked and brings her home to meet the family. I noticed that the lady kept calling him a name unknown to me, when I later asked him what was going on he explained that she doesn't like his Muslim name and finds it somewhat embarrassing so prefers to use his middle name…. I gulp ‘As in’ I'm thinking 🤔 ‘Houston we gotta problem here’. If the ‘young’ lady ‘kent’ deal with his given name, what chance do they stand? I asked him if she knew he was a Christian he replied yes but she still just couldn't get her head around his Muslim name. Now I'm thinking of the Yoruba Proverb which translates to something like this ‘What you will not eat, you have no business smelling in the first place’. What was she doing hanging around him if the Muslim name was such a big deal for her, she should ‘shift’ and find herself what she deems a bonafide ‘broda’ with a more appropriate name 😡. Really wished I could ask her to kneel in a corner, close eyes and raise both hands (if you know you know). Anyway that ended like the proverbial ‘Led balloon’🎈

Sorry to digress but don't you just hate what I've just done there? When the author of a tale becomes judge, jury and heroine with narrative panning out to show that their unheeded advise was the best option and the truth 🙄 😂  very self serving and predictable indeed. Why can’t the end of the tale ever be ‘well the young lady refused to call him by his Muslim name, but they still got married and lived happily ever after🤔

Anyways, I fast forward by about 2 decades, Happy family living in ‘the abroad’ and at the time firm members of what some Christians like to refer to as an ‘Orthodox Church’. Attendance every Sunday gave the children some structure, The congregation were predominately Caucasian and we were in the minority but all was good. I was a member of church council and welcome committee. I could set my clock by the timing of the church service 10:30 to 11:30, I'd actually bung my Sunday chicken in the oven before church and set timer. The girls always looked forward to Easter for the Easter egg hunt and Christmas as they'd always get picked for a role in the Nativity play. Occasionally I was rota’d to count the days offering at end of service, a role I disliked as I'm poor at arithmetic and it guaranteed an additional hour or 2 in church as we could not leave till all the figures added up.

My mum would often phone me on a Sunday afternoon casually asking me how church was, to keep her happy, ( I know…I know)  if I had not attended I'd lie and say church was good👀
She would then casually ask me to pass the phone to her grandchildren to greet them but would always ask them how they had found Sunday school at church that day… and the truth would out 💥⚡️🔥
Mum would then ask them to pass the phone back to me 🙆🏾🙆🏾🙆🏾

Anyways we are doing this year in and year out and eventually I started to feel something was missing in my spiritual life, but what could I do. Then one Easter I invited a couple to attend Easter service at our church, service felt rather slow that Sunday and I noticed my guests were struggling to stay awake, they were obviously bored stiff and not being carried along.
I then made a decision……🤔

To be continued…..this just has to be a 2-part blog!

How's your week been? Any stories about your faith?


Being a good writer is 3% talent and 97% not being distracted by the internet 🤓~ Anonymous

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