Commentary on the Odes of Solomon – by Swami Nirmalananda Giri
Clothed in Love
As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
I am putting on the love of the Lord.
And His members are with Him, and I am dependent on them and He loves me.
For I should not have known how to love the Lord, if He had not loved me.
For who is able to distinguish love, except the one that is loved?
I love the Beloved and my soul loves Him, and where His rest is there also am I.
And I shall be no stranger, for with the Lord Most High and Merciful there is no grudging.
I have been united to Him for the Lover has found the Beloved, And because I love Him that is the Son I shall become a son.
For he who is joined to Him Who is immortal, will also himself become immortal.
And he who has pleasure in the Life, will become living.
This is the Spirit of the Lord which is not false, which teacheth the sons of men to know His ways.
Be wise and understanding and vigilant.
(The Third Ode of Solomon)
I am putting on the love of the Lord
At the moment we are clothed in the material body. The Zoroastrian sage, Kaspar, said: “Man was a thought of God, formed in the image of the Septonate, clothed in the substances of soul. And his desires were strong; he sought to manifest on every plane of life, and for himself he made a body of the ethers of the earthly forms, and so descended to the plane of earth. In this descent he lost his birthright; lost his harmony with God, and made discordant all the notes of life. Inharmony and evil are the same; so evil is the handiwork of man” through the body which the Essene teacher Elihu called “the body of desires.”
“The lower self, the carnal self, the body of desires, is a reflection of the higher self, distorted by the murky ethers of the flesh. The lower self is an illusion, and will pass away; the higher self is God in man, and will not pass away. The lower self is the embodiment of truth reversed, and so is falsehood manifest.” Its is the body of desires that separates us from God by turning us outward away from the inner kindgom of God toward the transient world and creating in us a myriad desires, none of which cannot be fulfilled because nothing in the world can ever be possessed, but only grasped and eventually lost.
There is, however, another body, the “body of union” that is the immortal spirit. Regarding this the Essene teacher Salome said: “Now spirit loves the pure, the good, the true; the body of desires extols the selfish self; the soul becomes the battle ground between the two.” Those who ensure the victory of the spirit over the flesh are the ones who truly love God, for true love results in the union of the lover and the loved.
And His members are with Him, and I am dependent on them and He loves me.
Sri Ramakrishna said that when a person becomes transformed as he engages in spiritual life, everything in him that is of earth becomes duplicated, that counterparts are formed of divine love itself until a person possesses not only a material body but a “love body.” In actuality this love body is also the Body of God. The eyes with which the illumined behold God are the divine eyes. The ears with which he hears the divine voice are the ears of God. All the members of his love body are really the “limbs,” the faculties of God. The love that flows to him from God is immediately turned back toward God as an offering. This is why alchemy was often used as a symbol for spiritual life. In alchemy a substance is taken and its fluid completely removed. Then the dry and the liquid elements are recombined and once more separated by distillation. This may be done many times, for in alchemical theory each time the separation/union is accomplished the substance is profoundy changed and its natural properties are immeasurably increased and made pure. So it is with God and His devotees as their love moves in a continual cycle like a single breath moving within two bodies. Each time the individual pours the divine love back into the infinity of God, just so much more it increases in potency and is returned by God to him. “My beloved to me and I to him.”
Knowing that the ability to reach out for God is a capacity loaned to the questing soul by God, that in the realm of divine experience only the divine faculties are awake and functioning, the spirit says: “I am dependent on them.” This is the secret of real religion, of genuine spiritual life and transformation. When religious or seemingly spiritual impulses arise from the separated soul they can be nothing more than a shadow, a satire, and often a mockery. That person who seeks God “on his own” only wanders in the labyrinth of egoic delusion, harming both himself and those accompanying him in his folly. This is the fate of the impure; but the purified have quite a different story. Making “He loves me” the keynote of their life rather than sentimental declarations of their love for Him, they ascend to divine love and love God with His own love, leaving their pitiful earthbound emotion behind, purged from it in the fire of God-love, they truly do live in and by God.
For I should not have known how to love the Lord, if He had not loved me.
Somewhere I have told this incident before, but it fits here, too. Once Saguna Hejmadi, a cousin of Swami (Papa) Ramdas, the renowned twentieth century saint of India, asked Sri Ma Anandamayi: “Ma, when we think of You, do You thing of us?” Mother instantly responded: “How could you think of Me if I did not wish you to?” So it is: until God seeks us we do not seek Him; and until He actively (and practically) loves us we do not love Him. A person’s seeking of God is proof that he is beloved of God and that God is drawing near to him. We never upstage God. He is always there before us.
Sri Swami Muktananda Giri, the mother of Sri Anandamayi Ma, was the embodiment of perfect humility. Her quiet simplicity was a marvel. From my first meeting with her a singular thing occurred: I never pronamed–saluted her with joined hands–first; she always saluted me first. The moment she glimpsed me she would put her hands together in salutation. After a few months I decided that I was going to salute her first the next time we met, for it was I that should be showing respect to her, not the other way around. Early one morning I entered the gate of Bhagat House, the home of the Raja of Solan in Hardwar. The gate was forty or fifty feet from the doorway to the hall where Ma often sat (with Didima, as we called Her mother). As I turned right into the gate I was thinking that this time I would pronam to Didima first. But when I looked from the gate toward the door of the hall I saw Didima sitting there looking at me with joined hands! In this way she taught me what I have written in the previous paragraph. Jai Guru.
For who is able to distinguish love, except the one that is loved?
In Night of the Iguana Tennessee Williams speaks of “man’s inhumanity to God.” This at first is a shocking, even seemingly absurd, idea, but reflection will prove its validity. Human hardheartedness toward the loving God is a sorrowful wonder. Yet it cannot be otherwise, for until the active love of God enters the heart there is simply no way a person can realize the love of God for him. Only God can awaken us to His love. Those who go around trying to teach the love of God, thinking that they can inspire or produce love of God in others, are themselves devoid of that love; for if they possessed it they would know that only God can inspire divine love. “And that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God,” said Saint Paul.
I love the Beloved and my soul loves Him
The emotions, senses, mind, and intellect can conceive attractions and even addictions for objects–that is their nature, they cannot do otherwise. But they cannot love God. Only the spirit loves at all, and spirit can only love spirit. Consequently our spirit can love nothing else but God. But our lower self loves everything else, including its fantasy-idols of religiosity and its pathetic distortions that it thinks are valid concepts of God and spiritual aspirations and love of God. Only when such things are expelled from us can there be hope of loving God. Idolatry is the prevalent sin of us all. Without an awakened soul how could there be love of God?
And where His rest is there also am I
In Hebrew and Aramaic “rest” does not mean something done when a person is tired, but rather it means a place of retreat–with the implication of the point of a person’s origin, his “native” place. Therefore the “rest” of God means His primal, essential being. Since the individual spirit is one in essence with God, its rest is the same: God. The lover of God knows this and seeks that oneness alone. The “devotion” that comes from the lower self seeks heaven, “play” with God, “ecstatic love” and a thousand other silly diversions. None of them are true love of God, and that is evidenced by the fact that the desire is for enjoyment rather than being. “I want to eat sugar, not be sugar” is the quintessential statement of such egoic greed in relation to God. God is not a confection to be savored in a self-centered way.
The attitude of a true lover of God was expressed by Jesus when he said: “The Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” The human being can come to rest nowhere but in God; relative existence offers no rest or shelter for the wise. But only love of God reveals this truth to the questing spirit.
And I shall be no stranger, for with the Lord Most High and Merciful there is no grudging
How can we be a stranger to Him Who is our inmost being? Only the deluded experience estrangement from God. We think: “I am one and God is another,” but no such illusion taints God. Therefore He does not grudge us being one with Him. We, on the other hand, grudge God’s unity with us because it interferes with “our” ways and thoughts. We desire separation from God; this is the depth of our perfidy toward Him “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” We do not need to “win God’s friendship;” we need to stop being inimical toward Him.
I have been united to Him for the lover has found the beloved
This works from both sides. God “finds” us and we “find” Him. The “findings” are simultaneous, as are the “seekings.” Why do people not seek God? Because He is not seeking them. So leave them alone! The moment God actively turns His face toward someone they stir and turn toward Him. I experienced this graphically in 1963 when Sri Anandamayi Ma was in Calcutta (Agarpara). Thousands had come to see Her. Often She would be inside the ashram building, so they would just stand around, silent or speaking to one another. But then in the space of a few moments, without any signal, everyone turned and looked upward–and there was Ma standing in a window looking down at them. No one said a word to another or pointed upward. Each person was drawn from within to turn toward Her. She communicated directly with each one on the deepest level. As they say in India: “When anyone chooses God, it is because He has already chosen them.”
And because I love Him that is the Son I shall become a son
The concept of a trinity within the Divine Nature is found in all viable religions, expressing the transcendent, immanent, and active aspects of The One. In Christianity this is conveyed by the symbolic terms Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The “Son” is the Mahat Tattwa, the Presence of God within creation. This is the aspect of God that is communicatable and “knowable” to us. It is the itermediary between the individual spirit lost in the maze of relative existence and the transcendent Reality, the Father. Those who love God in His approachable aspect become united to Him and also become “sons of God” in their journey to perfect identity with the transcendent Father. Love is the uniting force–love arising from the spirit.
For he who is joined to Him Who is immortal, will also himself become immortal
He who is joined to Christ will become a Christ–this is the literal meaning of the word “Christian.” How far from this glorious truth have Christians strayed and become Churchians instead. Churchianity has trapped billions of souls by denying this simple truth of the potential Christhood of all. As long as we are separated from God we shall be mortal, bound to the endless cycle of birth and death; but as soon as we are united with Him we shall transcend that cycle–as does He.
And he who has pleasure in the Life, will become living
“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” We cannot love the illusion that is “the world” and love God at the same time. They cancel each other out automatically. We cannot delight in the nothing that is relativity and delight in God as well. Those who think they can have simply not experienced even a touch of God. However, the lover of God does not renounce the world–he is freed from it! It is no longer real enough to him to either dislike it renounce it. It is nothing in his eyes, for he has seen The ALL.
This is the Spirit of the Lord which is not false, which teacheth the sons of men to know His ways
All that has been said by this Ode is, according to the singer, the Spirit of the Lord–that is, the effect of the Spirit of the Lord in the life of the questing spirit. Any “Spirit” that does not produce the effects described in the Ode is not the Spirit of God, but the spirit of delusion–in which most people dwell. Over and over again false messengers tell us how we need not turn from earthly illusions, that they are God’s gift to us–even the results of our good karma! But the Spirit of the Lord teaches otherwise, teaching the sons of men the way to become the Sons of God. For “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” from all bonds and errors of earth. And we do not remain as we are, just “blessed” and “pleasing” to God. Rather, “we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” Therefore:
Be wise and understanding and vigilant
May it be so!More on the Odes of Solomon:
Odes of Solomon – text
Commentary on the Odes of Solomon:
1. The Crown of Life
2. Clothed in Love
3. The Changeless God and Ever-changing Man
4. Love, Hope, and Joy
5. Avoiding Evil
6. The Song of the Holy Spirit
7. Rejoice in the Lord!
8. The Meeting of the Two
1) Galatians 3:27
[Go back]
2) Aquarian Gospel 58:25-28 [Go back]
3) Aquarian Gospel 8:7-9 [Go back]
4) Aquarian Gospel 9:28 [Go back]
5) Ephesians 2:8 [Go back]
6) Matthew 8:20 [Go back]
7) James 1:17 [Go back]
8) “Given over to egoism, power, insolence, lust and wrath, these malignant people hate Me in both themselves and in others.” (Bhagavad Gita 16:18) [Go back]
9) “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” (John 15:16) [Go back]
10) Matthew 6:24 [Go back]
11) By “the world” I mean the world of human folly and illusions, not the world of God’s creation. [Go back]
12) II Corinthians 3:17 [Go back]
13) II Corinthians 3:18 [Go back]
