Next Sunday, March 24:
Intimate interviews with families
doing their best to satisfy their
deepest yen: to love and be loved.
A Report by
Robert R. Schwarz
At times Dr. Homa will gaze at his church's steeple and offer thanks for his spiritual rebirth a few decades ago in Medjugorje ( a famous religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia ) and also for the miracle he thought occurred in 2008 when, after collapsing in his office, he was rushed to a hospital and technically remained dead for 30 minutes until a transplanted donor's heart returned him to life.
There is more to know about how Dr. Homa's life had been changed since his return from Medjugorje, where millions of people have gone to be healed of various afflictions since several apparitions of the Virgin Mary have been since June 24, 1981.
Today Dr. Homa will occasionally see a patient in his artistically furnished penthouse. On one wall is a 13th Century oil painting of Jesus given to his wife as gift when he and she visited Istanbul. The doctor believes it's priceless. On other walls are a few prints by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali and an original, 1,000-year-old religious icon Dr. Homa purchased in Istanbul. Credit for the taste of all this he gives to Kathyleen.
The doctor has two daughters: Natalie , 50, a schoolteacher; Priscilla, and a son, Ted, 45, a vice president of an insurance company. Dr. Homa's father was an architect who renovated and helped build several theatres in New York City.
***
We sat down the other day and talked.
"I love holidays," he said. "They give me an excuse not to work. But I hate retirement. I used to play golf." He used to watch the TV comedy show Seinfeld.
What in life disturbs him? " Sometimes I meet a patient who's beyond saving, and I know that if I had had a chance to see him earlier, I might have saved him. " The doctor says he prays for his patients all the time. Does he think this helps? " Better than a lot of drugs." His message today to fellow Christians in the world is keep your anger in check and pray overtime! He characterizes much of the current American lifestyle as " pagan".
At his penthouse balcony
in Arlington Heights
He appears to shun leisure. " I love work," he
says. " My life is medicine. " He served eight to ten years as an overseas Naval medical officer and, after that, finished medical school at St. Louis University. He has authored the science fiction book (Archimedes' Claw, Author House,) and is writing a sequel to it. The doctor referred me to his memoir, "Standing Between the Gates of Heaven and the Precipice of Hell: A Doctor’s Experience with the Afterlife."
He needs no
prompt to tell you that since his return from Medjugorje—where, motivated by an
exodus trekker's curiosity in 1988, he went while in good health—he has taken
his faith life--as well as his health -- quite seriously. "When I
first came back from Medjugorje I was truly born again and filled with the joy
of Christian hope, love and faith, " he says. "I began to tell anyone who would listen,
about my experiences there, and the word soon went out that I was a changed
man. "
***
The
doctor is a hefty, five-foot-eight man who appears determined to remain fully alive, emotionally, mentally,
physically and, spiritually. "My health today is excellent," he says. Ted's been married more than 54 years to Kathy, whom he met in their college days. She is an RN nurse and sometimes arrives a half hour before a weekday Mass to wipe down the church pews.
Dr. Homa's faith life , I learned , had more
than once been challenged. Though raised as a Catholic, he told me that during
his college years at Fordham University, " I stopped thinking catechistically
and more philosophically. By the time I was out of
college I really didn't have a religion any more. I was probably an atheist. I went to church on Sunday to keep my wife
happy. "
***
A mean bump in Dr. Homa's life trek came nine years after his return from Medjugorje. Then 52, he suffered viral cardiomyopathy: " A virus attacked my heart and made it worthless," he said. In 2004, he was struck with pulmonary edema while vacationing in his Cape Cod home . "After that," he said, " things began to slide down hill and, by 2008, I knew my life was coming to an end. I was ready to die. I feared the dying but I accepted it. " He began saying a prayer which a Franciscan friar had taught him: Most sacred heart of Jesus, make my heart like yours. "I must have said it a million times."
A mean bump in Dr. Homa's life trek came nine years after his return from Medjugorje. Then 52, he suffered viral cardiomyopathy: " A virus attacked my heart and made it worthless," he said. In 2004, he was struck with pulmonary edema while vacationing in his Cape Cod home . "After that," he said, " things began to slide down hill and, by 2008, I knew my life was coming to an end. I was ready to die. I feared the dying but I accepted it. " He began saying a prayer which a Franciscan friar had taught him: Most sacred heart of Jesus, make my heart like yours. "I must have said it a million times."
"When
the final moment came for me, I was lying on a procedure table aware of the doctors' efforts to continue to do battle on my behalf.
The world of bright lights and excited voices faded in and then went out like
the turning of a switch. I experienced the pain of physical life tearing away
from my soul and I knew I was dead."
" There I found myself dancing , as it
were, on the head of eternity’s pin
enclosed in a great grey cryptogenic fog, the apparent purpose of which was
obfuscation. There I felt surrounded by enormous and ancient power delicately
limitless, commanding authority, most inescapable; it surrounded me. It was there
that I knew God existed without question."
These other phantasmagoric thoughts of this physician followed:
As
this was happening, I remember the pain of breathing and the lights in the
procedure room. Now I was in a gray place; there was no up or down; nothing to
see, nothing to feel, just gray. In an instant I felt a ripping throughout my
entire body. Searing pain was everywhere, like a tearing sensation. The thought came to
me that my soul was being ripped from my body. Immediately following this never-
to- be forgotten sensation was a voice, an ancient, accusatory, relentless
voice.
The
voice was reporting my sinful life to me and simultaneously revealing to me in
life- sized images that would change with each accusation the nature of each and
every sin I had ever committed. I learned of the effects of those sins. Each
one was like a pebble dropped in a pond, its effect spreading out from the source like
waves onto others. The sins of omission were detailed as well.
I was afraid. The voice continued. The parade
of sins over time continued. I logically reasoned that I was standing before
the judgment seat of God. The voice I heard was that of Satan. I felt weakness,
sadness, shame, but mostly horror and a need to give up and accept hopelessness.
Logic told me that I was saved; I had received the Last Sacraments and
absolution from a priest recently. I had even obtained a plenary indulgence.
Yet here I was, pressure mounting to despair listening to Satan describe to God
how unworthy I was to be saved.
" I began to pray directly to God the
Father. I addressed him by all the names I knew him by: Abba, Yahweh, and Father. I got no response. I
saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. Despair crowded me and reached for me
and I fought it off. "Jesus", I prayed, perhaps screamed, "Save me,
Jesus mercy, Jesus I know you are my Savior." Nothing happened, no
response, no message, no sensation, no light, just the overwhelming, choking of
despair. The grayness grew. I called out "Spirit save me! "
It was not a voice. It was not a vision.
It was a sensation with a message. The Spirit responded, and the message was
'Call upon Mary! ' I chose my
words carefully, and suddenly there was light, and the face of a beautiful woman crowned and
clothed in blue, white and gray. Her eyes were dark blue, I remember. She
stared at me and I at her. She raised her left hand and placed it on my face. I
felt the softness of her touch. Her fingers were spread so my eyes could see.
She addressed me by name. 'It’s ok Ted, go back... everything will be alright!'
***
"
When I was brought back
from the fluoroscopy lab, I was blue- black in color and lifeless. Emergency
measures advanced quickly to the ultimate attempt at rescue. My lifeless body was rolled into the
operating room for placement on the heart-lung machine and for the installation
of a left ventricular assist device (artificial heart). "
Waiting for his heart was arduous for Dr. Homa, as would be coping with having an artificial heart and its equipment to lug around. The mechanism made a tick-tock sound loud enough to be heard— embarrassingly so, he mentioned to friends during future Masses at St. James.
After years of now being heathy and busy as a doctor and family man, what had his near-death experience done for his faith life? " It made me prepare for real death, he said."
'I Have Learned How to Make God Laugh '
In his memoirs, Dr. Homa wrote:
" In days since then, and considering all that I have had the fortune to experience, even the misfortune to
endure, I have often thought, 'Why me?' And, frankly, I don’t know the answer to that
mystery. I am back to work full time and working on challenging projects in
medicine that I would have never dreamed of before. Some of these events swept
me up and tempered me like steel. Perhaps all of this is part of God’s plan. I remain
here to accomplish something. I don’t know what, but I keep listening for and
searching for clues to the mystery… I keep listening. I am no longer arrogant
enough to announce my plans to God. I have done that dozens of times. In a
sense, I have learned how to make God laugh. " Prayers for His Patients
The doctor said ," I lost the summer of 2022 because of a stroke." He and his wife were
vacationing in Cape Cod when he slipped on the bathroom floor and hit his head,
suffering, a subdural hematoma (hemorrhage of the covering of the brain) . He
was hospitalized for one month and spent six weeks in intense
rehab. "It didn't do anything to change my faith , he asserted. but it reinforced a couple of
things about my opinions. Being on the other side of the stethoscope teaches
you a great deal. You understand your patients' fears and concerns better. My wife and I have
a prayer list. " ( It's in a book by their bedside.)
Does he pray more today? "I think so. I'm going to Mass just about every morning. I read
the Bible and have become a fan of a rabbi named Johnathan Cahn. He's a Jewish
baptized Christian and preaches on U-Tube about Jesus all the time. I think he's a
prophet; we're missing the boat when we don't talk to our Jewish brothers. "
Challenges? "I'm struggling with what I should do about retiring, " I asked the doctor what might he like on his
tombstone . He paused and offered: "He Never Quit."
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