Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever
Today the Church celebrates the memorial of St. Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans.  
For the Dominicans, of course, today is liturgically a solemnity; for the Franciscans, it's a feast day.  
Actually, St. Francis and St. Dominic were good friends, both fellow mendicants of their day.  
Usually, on a saint's feast day, you expect to hear a gospel that reflects some truth or some teaching of our Lord that fits the character of the saint.  
Today's gospel, taken from the 9th chapter of St. Luke, actually doesn't do that.  
In many of the English Bibles, the title of the passage which we heard today is the would-be followers of Jesus.  Three men present themselves to our Lord, saying that they want to be his disciples, but in reality, they don't have what it takes to follow him.  It's exactly the opposite of who St. Dominic was in his life and what he did.  So let's listen to what Jesus said to these three different men and see how it relates in different ways to St. Dominic.  
To the first man who says that he'll follow our Lord, Jesus says, "Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head" (Luke 9:58).  So even common animals like foxes and birds have places that they can call their home, but a true follower of Christ doesn't have a permanent home on this earth.  “The world is your ship, not your home,” as St. Therese of Lisieux would say.  
Jesus himself was materially poor, and he was an itinerant preacher, going from place to place to the missions to preach the gospel.  The first man to whom Jesus addresses his words in today's gospel didn't want to embrace that kind of life. St. Dominic did.  
Once, a poor woman begged Dominic to give her alms so that she could ransom her brother, who had been made a slave by the Moors. Dominic had already given all of his money away to others, but he said to her, "I don't have gold or silver, but I'm able to work." He said, "Offer me to the Moors in exchange for your brother; I'll be their slave."  The woman was actually quite astonished by the offer and didn't accept it, but that was Dominic's charity.  
Even as a student, he would sell his books—at times, those books were very valuable, not like today—he would sell them in order to support the victims of the famine.  So he himself was ready to give everything away and follow Jesus, no matter what the cost was.  
To the second would-be disciple in the gospel, who first wanted to go home and take care of his family members, Jesus said, "Let the dead bury their dead. But you go and proclaim the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:60).  Jesus actually initiated the call to this man, telling him, "Follow me," but the man pulled an excuse out of the back of his pocket, shall we say, trying to do things on his own terms.  Jesus, in his response, told the man not to postpone the call of God for any reason. "Let the dead bury their dead," meaning that those who are spiritually dead aren't listening to or heeding the call of God, but those who are deaf to God, bury those who have died, leave them behind.  
In St. Dominic's life, the death of his mother affected him very deeply, but he used her passing as an opportunity to have his heart more perfectly detached from the things of this world and more perfectly attached to God and to the work that God had planned for him.  
To the last man in the gospel who wanted time to go home and put things in order before following Jesus, our Lord said, "No one who sets his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62).  If I get into my car and I drive to Indianapolis from here, and maybe all the while I'm driving, I'm fixing my eyes on what's going on in the rearview mirror of my car, instead of looking at the road ahead of me, what's going to happen to me?  Sooner or later, I'm going to finish where I shouldn't be finishing, right?  Either in front of a tree or off the road, or something bad is going to happen.  
It's essentially what our Lord is saying to this man here too. He's saying, once you make a choice to follow me, to be a religious or a priest specifically, don't look back.  So many religious, when things get difficult for us, we look back. We look back to our former lives or imagine our lives as easier than they were before, and sometimes we go off the road; we go back to those things.  
St. Dominic did what Jesus himself did. Jesus, when he was heading to Jerusalem, it said he set his face like flint to head to Jerusalem, we read in Luke 9:51.  Meaning Dominic, imitating our Lord, rolled up his sleeves and set out to accomplish the work of prayer and preaching, and the conversion of souls, and the founding of the Order of Preachers, without looking back. He kept going forward, he had his eyes fixed on the road.  
The successor of St. Dominic as head of the Order of Preachers, Blessed Jordan of Saxony, described the saint in a text of a famous prayer with these words. He said, "Your strong love burned with heavenly fire and God-like zeal, with all the fervor of an impetuous heart, and with an avowal of perfect poverty, you spent your whole self in the cause of the apostolic life, and in the preaching of the gospel."  
And Pope Benedict XVI, speaking of St. Dominic in a general audience in 2010, said, "It is precisely this fundamental trait of Dominic's witness that is emphasized: he always spoke with God and of God. Love for the Lord and love for neighbor, the search for God's glory and the salvation of souls in the lives of the saints always go hand in hand. Love for God, love for neighbor, salvation of souls, two things found a perfect match in the life of St. Dominic."  
So on this day, his feast day, let's ask our Holy Father, St. Dominic, for a true conversion of heart for us, so we too, like him, can fully carry out the plan that God has for our lives.  
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.