J.P. Arendzen - Ten Minutes a Day to Heaven

Ten Minutes a Day to Heaven

J. P. Arendzen

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

Ten Minutes a Day to Heaven is an abridged edition of Faith and Common Sense: Meditations for Sundays and Holidays (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne Ltd., 1938). This 2002 edition by Sophia Institute Press contains minor editorial revisions to the original text and doesnt include the preface in the original edition. The chapters have been reordered and grouped according to theme, and some have been combined.

Copyright 2002 Sophia Institute Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Lorraine Bilodeau

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Nihil obstat:
Reginald Phillips, S.Th.L.,
Censor Deputatus

Imprimatur:
Leonellus Can. Evans, Vic. Gen.
Westminster, September 19, 1938

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arendzen, J. P. (John Peter), b. 1873.
Ten minutes a day to heaven / J. P. Arendzen.
p. cm.Rev. ed. of: Faith and common sense. 1938.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-928832-75-X (alk. paper)
1. Christian life Catholic authors. 2. Catholic Church Doctrines. I. Arendzen, J. P. (John Peter), b. 1873. Faith and common sense. II. Title.BX2350.3 .A74 2003
248.482 dc21200215392403 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Editors note: The biblical quotations in the following pages are taken from the Douay-Rheims edition of the Old and New Testaments. Where applicable, quotations have been cross-referenced with the differing names and enumeration in the Revised Standard Version, using the following symbol: (RSV =).

Forward

At times it's easy ro think thar your journey to Heaven calls for more time, virtue, and courage than you have to give. The demands of family, work, and everyday life may leave you little time even ro pray, much less to grow in virtue and in your understanding of the Faith.

But it's precisely within the context of your everyday life, with all its demands, that God calls you to grow in holiness. What you must learn to do, therefore, is to use each moment and circumstance of your daily life to advance on the road to Heaven.

That's where this book can help you. In brief chapters that take only minutes to read, Fr. J. P. Arendzen teaches you how to put God first in your life, to pray better, to become holier, to fight sin, to practice charity toward others - in short, to advance on the road to Heaven. Take just ten minutes each day to read one chapter and to put into practice what it teaches, and that small daily investment will bring you an everlasting reward: Heaven.

Part One

Center your life on God

Chapter One

Commend your journey to Heaven to Gods care

Not infrequently you come across loud and ludicrous advertisements of self-styled geniuses who will teach you, for a modest fee, by word of mouth or by correspondence, how to have confidence in yourself or how to overcome that fatal shyness, that feeling of impotence and inferiority which hampers all your undertakings and prevents success. They will teach you self-reliance, boldness in speech and behavior, and daring in enterprise. They will tell you to secure by your own unaided efforts a radiant future. All for a small fee booklet included!

In worldly affairs, there may possibly be something in it, about one percent of what is claimed, but in the great business of going to Heaven, the key to success is reliance on the grace of God and utter distrust in ourselves. The source of endless failures, and the reason for even final disaster of passably good people is too much self-reliance, apart from God. People forget Original Sin. Original Sin has weakened and wounded our nature.

Our nature is not fundamentally corrupted; that is quite true. We still have free will. We have many good instincts. We often dream of heroic deeds, like St. Peter a few hours before his fall. He was prepared to go to prison and death for his Master, but as a matter of fact he did not, except some thirty years later, when he had learned more dependence on God.

The man who, on seeing the sins of others, lays his hand on his breast and proudly says, Now, I could never do that! is like the apostle who boldly looked around the company of his fellow apostles and then said to his Master: Although all should be scandalized in Thee, yet not I. There are and have been many fair-weather saints who, when the sun was shining, sang a boastful song of their future prowess, but who, on the first blast of the storm, lay prostrate in the mire of sin. It is strange that we learn so little by experience.

There is not one of us who could not tell a tale of grand plans and poor execution, of great promises and little fulfillment, of big words and small things to show for them, a rattling of swords before the foe was in sight and a precipitate flight when he appeared. And if we examined ourselves, we would see that in all cases it was due to overwhelming self-confidence. On the occasions when, by Gods grace, we really triumphed, our triumph followed humble anxiety, lest we should fail.

There is an old story of the Scotsman who told the overconfident young preacher who had gone to the pulpit with a swagger, but left it crestfallen after a hopeless breakdown, Man, if you had gone up such as you came down, you would have come down such as you went up.

Must, then, the Christian be forever a craven and a coward and be whimpering and whining about his weakness and incapacity? Must he be a chronic sufferer from an inferiority complex? Must he never feel any pluck or courage and face the future like a man? No, indeed. But his confidence is through Christ in God.

A Christian grasps his crucifix and repeats with St. Paul, I can do all things in Him who strengtheneth me! Of myself, I may be nothing, but with Christ Ill face principalities and powers and spirits of wickedness in high places. With Christ even the weakness of my human nature is filled with indomitable strength. Without Christ I can do nothing, but He can make divine force flow from His manhood into mine and transform me into a hero if He chooses.

I have unlimited strength at my disposal, if only I pray. I must acknowledge that of myself I am feeble and worthless; that, left to myself, the most paltry temptation could overthrow me, and then I must look up to Christ and say, Thou art all, and there is nothing created that can resist Thy might. With Thee nothing is impossible, not even to strengthen this feeble creature who depends utterly on Thee, and so to strengthen this creature that all must yield to the power borrowed from Thee.

Let any man look around in the history of mankind, and he will not fail to see that the saints have performed feats of superhuman strength, that they have endured beyond what human nature by itself can bear, that their willpower has been the amazement of their fellowmen, that their perseverance has been the marvel of their own generation, that their achievements have exceeded that of scores of others who tried to blunder through by themselves. Then let him ask himself, What was their secret? They will with one voice answer him: Our confidence was with Christ in God. It was God who worked in us, and strength was made perfect in infirmity.

Chapter Two

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