By Robert R. Schwarz
Dr. Theodore M. Homa, a 67-year-old internist and published novelist, will tell you he's been twice re-born: once in Medjugorje, the religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia, and then again in Oak Lawn , Illinois , where he was brought back to life on a hospital operating table after being technically dead for 30 minutes.
Today he spends his new birth days with elderly residents at the Lutheran Home in his home town of Arlington Heights , Illinois, and advises several teams of physicians affiliated with other nursing homes. He appears to shun leisure . " I love work, " he says. " My life is medicine. " He has managed, however, to write a science fiction book (Archimedes' Claw, AuthorHouse, Bloomington , Ind , 2011 ) and a soon to be published memoir of his near-death experience.
You'll also see Dr. Homa in a Sunday pew at his St. James Catholic church. 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 quite seriously. During his three days there, he says he saw miracles. "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. "
We talked in his ninth floor penthouse in downtown Arlington Heights, which is richly decorated with artistic pottery and well-crafted Tuscan-style furniture . Adorning the walls are oil paintings that include a few prints by 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 Kathleen, his wife of 42 years . The doctor is a hefty , five-foot-eight man who appears determined to remain fully alive emotionally, mentally, physically and, of course, spiritually. When I told him he looked pretty good considering his admitted 12-hour work days and the heart transplant he had in January, 2009, he smiled and said, " that's because I have a 24-year-old heart."
There was more to know about how Dr. Homa's life had been changed since his return from Medjugorje , where millions of people have come to be healed of various afflictions since the first of several apparitions of the Virgin Mary was reported on June 24, 1981 . So 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. In it he candidly describes his life prior to Medjugorje :
Peter denied Christ three times. When he realized what he had done he wept uncontrollably. I have denied Christ many more times than that, during my life as an agnostic. I did not weep about this for almost three decades.
The secular world and secular progressivism had an appeal to me and I enjoyed living my life by a set of rules that I could pick and choose from a menu as if in a restaurant. Do not misunderstand me. I had a set of values based on the law, science, family, business, friendship, loyalty, and the understanding of that which the great philosophers of history and the modern philosophers of the sixties and seventies have spoken about and written about prolifically. I embraced the philosophy that if something did not harm others it was justifiably correct behavior. My politics were always conservative but not religious conservative. They were more based on the disdain for altruism for altruisms sake expressed in the writings of Ayn Rand. Rand was certain that the proper perspective on life and politics was to be founded upon self-love and personal interest. She believed that good would result from that and that economic success would as well and equated both.
I was most interested in the altruistic goals of helping others with my medical skills, which I honed obsessively to perfection. I knew intrinsically this would lead to wealth and position and most of all respect of my friends and community. I never cheated on time or commitment to the oath I took when I graduated from medical school. Patients flocked to my office and I was successful overnight. I threw myself into work and began to accumulate all the wealth and position and praise that I wanted.
I loved my family and there was never enough time for them because of the way I had immersed myself in the rushing river of life. My wife means the world to me and so do my children. At her demand I attended Mass on Sunday and participated in physical presence only to give, what she demanded would be, a good example to the children. While they prayed I would muse and worry about business and overhead and investments. My pager went off frequently and took me for a needed break from the tedium I perceived was sitting through the Sunday Mass with long meaningless readings, music, and sermons. The priests that I admired then were those that were not “preachy”, long winded and were a good challenge on the golf course. My favorite part of Sundays was playing golf at the country club and meeting my family in the grill room for cocktails and dinner. When the season would change and the weather was colder, Sundays with “Meet the Press” blaring from the TV was followed by football, usually the Chicago Bears.
I was never a person who suffered lightly abuse of women or children. I was chivalrous to a fault. I never stole or told lies. I never broke my marriage vows.
I did my share of cursing and swearing. Using God’s name in vain was the only time I used it. I publicly honored my father and my mother but privately did not respect my mother and feared my father until I was mature enough to call him my friend, a status my mother never completely shared with me. I coveted a lot and it drove me to work harder. I loved my brother. I was jealous of and misunderstood my sister as the late in life child of my parents, but I did not hold that against her.
I was not opposed to abortion. I was pro death penalty; my attitude was “fry them, they earned it”. War was a problem for me as I was a product of the sixties but also had a conservative streak and was what I considered a patriot. I certainly did not appreciate being involved with the military at the time of the Vietnam War, but was conflicted about it as well politically . I believed someone had to fight the threat of communism. I did not have the avid interest in history that I do now.
I learned that his faith life had more than once been challenged. Though raised as a Catholic, he told me that during his college years at Fordham University he "stopped thinking catechetically and more philosophically. " He added, "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. " In his first year at a Jesuit medical school, he said an anatomy instructor posed this challenge to the class : " If you think you can find it, dissect out the soul. "
A mean bump in Dr. Homa's trek came nine years after his return from Medjugorje. Then 52, he suffered viral cardiomypathy: " 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 prayed what a Franciscan friar had taught him: Most sacred heart of Jesus make my heart like yours. " I must have said it a million times."
Dead for 30 Minutes, then a Parade of Sins,
Followed by the Virgin Mary Speaking to Him
Perhaps his most memorable experience is one he can't remember. That's because he was dead when it occurred—technically dead for 30 minutes. In July of 2008, he collapsed while working in his office and was taken to Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights. He had had several blackouts , which now had filled his legs with fluid, severely lowered his oxygen and blood counts, and swelled his neck veins until his face had turned blue-gray.
He described his final moments of consciousness before he "died " :
"When the 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 surrounded me. It was there that I knew God existed without question."
Other phantasmagoric thoughts 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 fom 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 ," Dr. Homa continued. " 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). "
Asked what else had his near-death experience done for his faith life ? " It made me prepare for real death ."
'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. " Because he had believed that successful heart transplants were rare, Dr. Homa saw a transplant as " an option as horrible as death. " Nevertheless, he requested to be put on a waitlist for a heart . Doctors rejected the first 23 donor hearts because of the donors' "bad social history" ( suspected drug addiction or AIDS ) . Waiting for his heart became as arduous for him as was coping with the artificial heart and its equipment he now had to lug around. The mechanism made a tick-tock sound loud enough to be heard— embarrassingly so— during the homilies at St. James.
He began taking three-mile fitness walks. During one of his walks in November while praying the Rosary and asking Saint Theresa for " a heart by December, " Dr. Homa was forced to make a slight detour from his regular route. He came across a garden of roses (for centuries, the flower associated world-wide with the Virgin Mary) unusually blooming for that late in the season ). Dr. Homa saw no other blooms on plants around him. "It was at that point that I knew I was going to get a heart," he said. " On Christmas Day at 5 a.m. I got a call from Rush Presbyterian Hospital saying ' we got a heart. Be here at 6 a.m. ' "
Prayers for His Patients
How has all of this changed his professional relationship with patients? " Being on the other side of the stethoscope teaches you a great deal. You understand your patients' fears and concerns better. " He now prays for them. "My wife and I have a prayer list. " It's in a book by their bedside.
Our interview took an intermission when his wife Katheen, preceded by the Homa's pug dog Barny ( short for Barnacle ) , entered the room to help field a question about ages of their children . There are daughters Natalie , 38 , Priscilla , 35 , who is a school teacher, and lawyer son , Ted, 32. There are 10 grandchildren. Dr. Homa's father was an architect who renovated and help build several theatres in New York City.
What makes him happy? "My grandchildren, my wife. I love holidays. They give me an excuse not to work." And what disturbs him? " Sometimes I meet a patient who's beyond saving, and I know that if I had a chance to see them earlier, I might have saved them."
After a tour of the penthouse and a peek at his gun collection and autographed major league baseballs, we step outside onto the patio. To the northeast is a wide swath of towering trees . A mile or so way and rising above the trees and everything else is the St. James steeple. I wondered—but failed to ask—if this sight ever inspired Dr. Homa to pray while gazing out at it.
I asked the doctor what might like on his tombstone . He paused and offered: "He Never Quit."
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