A Sabbath Poem (Rabia)

I HOPE GOD THINKS LIKE THAT
~ Rabia of Basra (c. 717-801)

There is a dog I sometimes take for a walk
and turn loose in a
field,

when I can’t give her that freedom
I feel in debt.

I hope God thinks like that and

is keeping track of all
the bliss He
owes
me.

Born nearly five hundred years before Rumi, Rabia was a central female Islamic figure of Sufi tradition. As a young woman, while wandering homeless, she was abducted, sold into slavery and spend decades working in a brothel, exposed to both physical and sexual abuse. Later in life, she became one of the greatest women saints and poets known to history. She once said, "What a place for trials and transformation did my lover put me, but never once did He look upon me as if I were impure." Rabia is a timely spiritual voice for women of this century, especially for any woman (or man) who had had to suffer the emotionally crippling degradation of unwanted touch. After she was given freedom, she helped people heal and was offered a bag of gold for her work, to which she responded, "Dear, if you leave that, flies with gather as if a horse just relieved himself, and I might slip in it while dancing."

(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002)