Jesuits on sabbatical sometimes travel to distant lands, live in different communities, read great books, work alongside the poor. It is a time for discernment and reflection, important elements of the Ignatian journey.

I began thinking of going on sabbatical a little over a year ago. I wasn’t thinking about going anywhere different, but for the preceding several years I had been going through a transition. Slowly and internally, almost unaware of how the changes had occurred, I had become rooted in the routines of being a father – not a priest – but a father to four children, ranging from age 4, when I started my sabbatical, down to our newborn daughter.

Tom and Brenda Hoover gather the family (above) in the living room of their Omaha home. Brenda is an audiologist at Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. Tom has spent the past year on sabbatical from his teaching job at home with the kids. Pictured clockwise from the top are Tom, 11-month-old Kate, Mary, 3, Bozeman (49 in dog years), Jack, 5, Grace, 2 and Brenda. Tom (below), with Kate in tow, gives Jack a time out.

Brenda, my wife, is an audiologist. I teach theology at Creighton Prep in Omaha, Nebraska. Our four children came quickly to our busy lives.We made adjustments and hurtled headlong into parenthood. I made the necessary changes without a lot of reflection about exactly what those changes meant to me and my growing family. After four years of fatherhood, I wanted to become more familiar with my children and the kind of parent I was becoming.

At first glance, my sabbatical experience and the experiences of my Jesuit friends would appear to be quite different. Theirs sometimes take them to distant places, Belize or Korea maybe. I traveled 16 blocks from Prep’s front doors to our Dundee neighborhood home. My Jesuit colleagues favor authors like Merton and Nouwen on their sabbaticals; mine are Seuss and Sendak. Their photographs might wind up in books or even galleries; mine are for the refrigerator door and Christmas cards. They might build latrines to serve a third world village; I assembled a tiny tot toilet to get a kid out of diapers.

Though our sabbatical experiences appear to be completely different, one element makes all the differences irrelevant – the opportunity to contemplate more deeply our vocations. I wanted to find out if that contemplation could occur amid the chaos that exists in living with four young children and consistently attending to their daily needs, sometimes all at once. A typical snapshot of the start to a typical day in my sabbatical life would make a great cartoon panel of one man’s stand against a breakfast- time tsunami of demanding needs.

“More juice please. More juice, please.” Standing at the kitchen sink with a squirming Kate in my arms, her face smeared with bananas, her hands caked with half chewed Cheerios, and her hair streaked with apricots, I turn to the voice. “More juice,” Mary’s plea continues from the table. Adding to the rising cacophony is five-year-old Jack standing by the radio and reacting to bits of the morning news with an intermittent wave of questions a few seconds apart. “What’s a missile?” – “Who is Saddam Hussein?” – “Is he the bad guy?” – “What is enemy?” Kate’s shrieking objections to my efforts to clean her up nearly drown out the high pitched screeching of two-year-old Grace standing in the kitchen doorway naked, except for her feet which swim in Jack’s cowboy boots. She looks quite pleased with herself. Admittedly, I am too. Boots are a start to self-sufficiency. Through it all, Bozeman, our golden retriever, sleeps as Mary continues her patient plea of “More juice, please.”

Tapping her creativity at an early age, Kate Hoover employs her stroller as a walker and is teaching herself to walk.

Early in my sabbatical I often projected my own dreams into Bozeman’s sleep, imagining his slumbered thoughts to be of an earlier time when he didn’t have to share a house with kids. But tsunami mornings and everything in between have drawn out of me the greatest expression of who I am meant to be. Jesuits have a Latin word for this – Magis.

Creighton Prep continually calls faculty to live the Magis, which loosely translated means to seek the greater good. Magis is Jesuit for giving 110 percent for the team; win one for the Gipper; chaperone as many freshman dances as possible; drive a 1989 Honda Civic; strive for the greater glory of God. As a teacher, it is an invitation and challenge I welcome.

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