Because of fear of hell
Then burn me in hell.
If I worship You
Because I desire paradise
Then exclude me from paradise.
But if I worship You
For Yourself alone
Then deny me not
Your eternal beauty.
There is much wisdom in this small gem of a poem written by Rabia Basri, an 8th-century Iraqi Muslim mystic and saint. I came across it in a collection of Sufi verse, and even among the more elaborately imagined poems of masters like Rumi and Hafiz, it stood out for its truth and clarity. Great work requires no more than what needs to be said.
In just a few words Rabia answers one of humankind’s most basic and ancient questions – how can suffering exist in the world? The crucial line is: For Yourself alone.
The poem is a devotional appeal to God, but non-religious contemporary Westerners need not turn away as a result. If “Lord” is substituted with “Life” the sense of the poem remains. We worship life in the way we regard it, in our outlook, expressed in our day-to-day living. Rabia is saying that if our attitude to existence is egocentric – wanting only what is good and rejecting the bad and difficult, then we deserve to (and will) suffer. But if we ask of life purely what it gives us and love it for all that it is, For Yourself alone, then the desire (and presumably the outcome) is one of resting in eternal beauty, in the deep beneficence of creation.
The poem is also relevant to a great religious dilemma that has exercised the human mind through history, expressed in the question: How can a loving God exist in the midst of suffering? Again, the ego-bound attitude asks for goodness and avoidance of harm from the powers that rule the universe, when those powers cannot properly be known or encompassed by the human mind, the mystery of life being ultimately unfathomable. The disillusionment with God that arose in many people after the horrific events of the 20th century – two World Wars, the Holocaust, the dropping of the atom bomb – is in reality the disillusionment of humanity with itself, or its projection of ego onto the divine, seeking to avoid hell and to enter paradise.
Religions for centuries nurtured this projection, constructing a divine Father who rewarded the good and punished evildoers. This lasted as long as religion was at the centre of society and the majority of people were unable to penetrate the veil of its doctrine; once the rational mind became dominant and questioning and doubt were unleashed, the Father toppled from his pedestal.
Rabia upsets the role of conventional religion in providing a moral framework for human behaviour, where fear of divine retribution prevents wrongdoing and desire for divine grace encourages good acts. She wants none of that, only to experience a direct relationship with God, which she sees as all-encompassing. There is a ring of correspondence to our time in Rabia’s vision beyond God the lawmaker; many of the spiritual explorers of the present day in the West are looking for a pure experience of the sacred free of the rigid moral compass of the past.
In its rejection of self-interest, the poem expresses an elevated consciousness that, for most of us most of the time, is hard to reach. The difficulty arises, unavoidably, because all of us are creatures in time and space. In a very creaturely way we seek our own benefit from the environment around us; we seek to live, to grow and reproduce ourselves, while keeping away from harm. There are certain laws and dynamics that pertain to life in the created world. But the material aspect is not all there is to living, and this is what the poet is pointing to; the demands of spirit – of the depth dimensions of existence – run in some sense contrary to those of matter.
Spirit asks for a unifying consciousness, an acceptance of oneness beyond appearances, as the appropriate means to fulfil the core of the human journey. Matter, on the other hand, seeks a discriminating view of tangible subjects and objects. Resolving this tension is a difficult challenge. As beings in time and space we can’t deny what that entails, but neither should we surrender to the ego and cancel out the spiritual path. Each person ultimately has to look beyond him or herself and align with spirit.
For Yourself alone then becomes a call to embrace the fullness of life without reservation, its highs and lows, while orienting past the hurly-burly of phenomena to what really counts at the heart.
