Love is one of the most important
concepts for all religions. Even though
love is studied in variety of subjects, it is always a fascinating and
contemporary topic of theology. In this sense, the
concept of “loving surrender” of Francis Xavier Clooney can be used as a beam
of light to illustrate a profound understanding of love in our life: love as a union with God and with oneself to be transcended and transformed.
One really surrenders everything to God, even losing oneself into God to
become one with God. In serving as a key to
the title of de Sales' Treatise, Clooney describes “loving surrender” as
“about love, God's love and the drawing of human desire, pleasure, and love up
into the divine fullness.”
Arnold Janssen, the founder of the Society of the Divine Word had lived this “loving surrender” throughout his life, his words and works.
He had shown the world with a profound love through his mystical experience in union with God and his personal life with sacrifice,
humility, and transformation. He had not only entered into union with God with his burning love for God, but also shared that love to all his brothers and sisters through his life and mission. He had learned to look into difficulties
and challenges as ways to achieve love, and also as paths that human beings have to go through to
reach mysterious and spiritual experiences. In a word, Janssen
had wanted to convey a very significant message to all people that our love can
transcend us, purify us, and transform us to a very special relationship with
God, with ourselves, and with the world. For him, one can obtain the mystical
love of God, experience this
love with the attitude of sincerity and humility, and give this love to life. As a great devotee
to the Sacred Heart, Arnold Janssen had taken this special path of love to the world.
Historical Influences on Janssen’s Devotional life of Love
Arnold Janssen (1857-1909) was a teacher and Catholic
Missionary. Among many devotions to the Catholic faith, he was recognized as a
faithful devotee to the Sacred Heart of Jesus called the Little Messenger of
the Sacred Heart.
Through this devotion, he delivered a very significant message of love in union
with God through the image of God the Son, who came to the world, dwelt in us,
became one of us, and became the Sacred Heart. For him, this was love, an
inseparable relationship between God and humanity.
He said, “The Heart of Jesus was the most worthy and dignified dwelling
of the Holy Trinity and the best model for the dwelling of God in the hearts of
people.”
He was born in 1857 in the village
of Goch on the banks of the river Niers in lower Rhineland, Germany. He grew up
in a family with a strong Christian education and piety. His parents were very
faithful to the prayer life, teaching their children how to perform all pious
practices seriously. Janssen was an outstanding student especially in the
natural science and mathematics. “By his diligence in carrying his tasks, by
his observance of discipline, humility, modesty, and a fervent spirit, he won
for himself the highest esteem of his fellow-students.”
From 1873-1875, he intended to build
a mission house in Germany. However, the Catholic Church in Germany was under a
bitter persecution called Kulturkampf by the chancellor Bismarck with numerous
difficulties. To avoid
the persecution, he moved to Holland and bought an inn in the village of Steyl.
Again, his fundamental spirituality was the Sacred Heart. Therefore, he
dedicated himself and his work to the Sacred Heart. In 1875, he founded the
first mission house there. For him, this was the manifestation of the love of
the Sacred Heart, which was recognized as the model for his future
mission. He came out with his motto:
“May the heart of Jesus live in the heart of all.”
Arnold Janssen became the founder of
the Society of the Divine Word with a goal to bring faith and love to people
in other cultures throughout the nations. The members of the Order have to take
and live three vows: chastity, poverty, and obedience.
In this formation, the members are faithful to live the life of celibacy,
purifying themselves with the love for God and for others, living in poverty to
let go all the attachments, and letting go of the ego by living the vow of
obedience. Practicing these vows, they are willing to love and serve all people
without distinction of social status, wealth, or cultures. Father Janssen began this
purpose by sending the first missionaries to China. Then, he continued to send
missionaries to “work for the salvation of the souls” in many parts of South
America, Africa, and Asia.
Janssen’s burning love for the
missions had continued to be nurtured in his devotional life with an intimate
relationship with God. Although he was busy with many duties, he never felt
separate from God. Through his union with God, people saw that “He may rightly
be called a man full of the grace and love of God.” As a result, he found two other congregations
of Sisters: the Servants of the Holy Spirit and the Servants of the Holy Spirit
of Perpetual Adoration. The Sisters of the second Order follow the footsteps
of Janssen to devote themselves completely to the contemplative life, searching
for the harmony and union in God. His congregations have spread throughout the world
nowadays, over 70 countries. Moreover,
he had continued to develop other aspects of missionary life: “By spreading
religious literature, a thing very dear to his heart, the Servant of God
contributed much towards in instructing the laity in Christian doctrine and
towards fostering in them the missionary spirit.”
Love – Union with God as the Lover and the Beloved
Love is the language of Arnold
Janssen when he practices his devotion to the Sacred Heart, “Love makes one
enter into the Beloved, unites one with the Beloved, makes one seek the
interests of the Beloved, and sacrifices oneself for the Beloved.” This kind of love is also experienced by most
of human beings in a way when they are caught up in doing something
with the burning passion. For example, one person is lost himself in the moment
of contemplation that there is no boundary between him/her and God. The
transcending experience of love can "burn" all the distance, separation, human
convictions and laws to obtain an absolute union with God.
Human beings as lovers, we carry the
Beloved with us and are capable to find the Beloved in ourselves. To experience the divine within him through love, Arnold Janssen had lived the
conviction that the Holy Trinity dwelt in him through the gift of
sanctifying grace. He wrote: “Through sanctifying grace, the Holy Trinity lives
in our souls.” Therefore, one of his prayer mottoes was that, “May the Holy
Triune God live in our hearts and in every heart.” In other words, when talking about the divine
indwelling, Arnold described his idea in You Are Gods that, “When
God thus penetrates our souls, we thereby receive something of the divine nature,
just as the iron in the fire become like fire.” Therefore, when people are in love, they are
dissolved in each other. The outsiders of that love can never understand that
mysterious relationship by the mind or rational thoughts because it is a mystical
love being dwelt only between the lover and the Beloved. This seems to be
compatible to the “loving surrender” of Clooney, meaning giving up oneself to
God. Indeed, the Beloved and the lover can be dwelt in each other in the
consuming love “like the reed by the fire of divine love.”
Love – Voice of the Heart
The strength of love is dwelt in our
heart. The lover just simply opens his/her heart to let the Beloved come to
experience the intimacy and union with the lover. Regardless to the
language of love between the lover and Beloved, for Janssen, human beings were
born to love God and to be loved by God. This experience of love is a mystery
that is hard to understand by our mind, but it is deepened in our heart.
Therefore, we need to awake the heart so that it can remember the love in it
and function well to relate with the world around. Once the heart is awakened, the
love between the lover and Beloved are not able to separate and having no
distance at all. Indeed, they are lost in each other. The lover is completely immersed into the
Beloved to enjoy the moment of happiness with each other. Once the heart is
awakened, the power of love becomes unbelievable as Mawlana Jalal Al Din Rumi
describes “Love makes the ocean boil like a kettle, and makes the mountains like
sand.”
Therefore, our task
is to awake the heart to love God and become one with God. Arnold Janssen had absolutely recognized the energy of
love in the heart. This energy is for us to love totally and deeply. This
energy makes us capable to overcome difficulties. For Arnold Janssen, the way to the
depth of the heart is through examination of conscience as he said, “To love
God ‘with our whole heart’ is the first and the greatest, but certainly also
the most difficult commandment. Every examination of conscience makes me aware
how far I am still from this totality of love. In spite of that, I assure God
of my love and thus become alert to the situation in which I should express my
love as goodness in word and deed.”
In other words, this kind of love can be seen as mysterious because it exists
beyond the limitation of human verbal language.
Love – Humble and Sacrificial Living
When we love, we become humble to
recognize our true self and accept the reality rather than complaining or being
irritated with things around us. In this sense, the humble love becomes the
instrument to reconcile with ourselves and with others, and helps us overcome
difficulties and challenges in life. Therefore, this love can make miracles
happen in our lives every moment. The sacrificial love as the
surrendering love can weaken our ego that sometimes causes hatred and anger.
To live this humble and sacrificial love, we need to look at others as
ourselves with a deepest understanding of our own need for love. Therefore, love living on humility and
sacrifice is not a path with all beautiful flowers and good things on that. However, it has many challenging things to overcome. If we see
that love is a burning fire in our heart, we are willing to love even though we
are facing the pain and suffering. Like Arnold Janssen, he had embraced the cross
because he believed that when he loved he would open his heart to welcome the
pain and suffering of this world. Love is not a feeling any more, but an act to
experience the pain and suffering. He had faced them rather than avoiding them; and he
had experienced peace for doing so. He said: “It pleases God, the Lord, to test us
and to send us out into the storm. We are grateful and carry our cross with
patience and joy since it will be clear that in the cross is salvation. After
the storm will come a dependable peace.” He continued to express his burning love for
God through his prayer that “Because of Thy great goodness, I love Thee, O my
God! Because of my miserable sinfulness, I detest myself, O my God! Because of
the burning love of my Savior in the most Blessed Sacrament, I long for thee, O
my detest Jesus”
The love of the lover needs to be
fully humble and sacrificial to cling to the love of the Beloved with whole
heart and without asking for conditions. It is amazing to acknowledge this
spirit of sacrifice from Janssen when he talked about Love lives on
Sacrifice as expressed in his beautiful words, “O wonderful power of
love, which delights in seeking what others flee from, and in not avoiding what
is hard and painful to nature. O mysterious depths of those noble souls who
cleave firmly to God, who cannot endure living except to suffer for the object
of their love, and who draw spiritual life and strength and growth from their
suffering.”
Love – Being Transformed from Inside Out
When talking about Janssen's heroic
love for his neighbors, Godfried Groessl presents a broader love of Janssen
that nothing is to earn for himself, but toward sinners, lay brothers, the
sick, the poor, the dead, the prisoners, and the enemies. Particularly, his
love for his enemies is clearly described, “Unmindful of their calumnies, and
ignoring the injuries they inflicted upon him, he took their honor and good
reputation very much to heart, as if the duty of preserving it had been
entrusted to himself.”
In this transforming love, there is
a conflict between the outside force and the soul from inside. The outside
force asks us to do something that makes us feel safe and comfortable ourselves
or to fulfill our own purposes and reasons. However, the spirit from inside
encourages us to recognize the true passion to love others and to do best for
them. Janssen recognized well this controversy in his human heart and transformed
it into his strength: “Deep down he knew himself to be an instrument in the
hands of Divine Providence, in the service of Holy Church and in the service of
the missions and of his own spiritual sons and daughters. He did not want more
attention paid to himself or to his work was absolutely necessary for its
existence and growth and he tried to avoid any praise of himself when it was
given by his confreres or by outsiders.”
Sometimes, the outside force is strong and occupied in our heart; we tend to
fear that we will lose our own interests. Therefore, we have to fight for the
spirit to be stronger so that love is performed again in our life. In reality, there is
no affirmation that human beings can be sure that the transforming love can
guarantee to teach us how to love ourselves and others with a certain standard.
Therefore, the transforming energy of love
enables us to be more listening to our own heart and attentive to the need of
the world.
Conclusion
Arnold Janssen is an ordinary man, but having extraordinary love in his heart. Historically, his personal appearance shows
so much passion and love for life. His dedicated and devoted life is so
beautiful and spiritual that fascinates us to treasure his wonderful gifts for
the world. He has burning love for God and for people expressed through the mystical
experience and transcending encounter with God and others through his humble and sacrificial life. Janssen shows that love can teach us so many things
that we can never obtain them without love. Love blows into
things and values them as mystical experiences so that many miracles can enter into our
lives.
Janssen’s mysterious passion and
love are strongly illustrated through his life and mission, in which his fellows nowadays want to discover to experience for their lives. Specially, his passion and love for the
devotion to the Sacred Heart is so meaningful and spiritual for his relationship with God and
with others. Through the honor to the Sacred Heart, he inspires others to
discover the mystical love in their relationship with one another. Father Stanley Plutz, SVD describes the impact of this kind of devotion
that, “In that relationship, all the thoughts, words, and actions of the one
loving tend to honor and please the loved one. For example, a wife is devoted
to her husband. All her thoughts and actions flow from her love for her husband.”Janssen had lived his commitment
and passion faithfully that allowed him to surrender everything to become
transformed and emptied to receive the love of the Beloved. For him, love transcends everything
and helps foster and promote the passion within the beautiful human heart and
wisdom. Therefore, we want to take that same journey of love to lead us closer to God, Who is our eternal Home.
