Leaving on vacation is risky business. To enter your vacation world means that you leave the place called home; and the place called home doesn't stand still until you return. One year while I was on vacation our President declared war on Iraq. Another year a beloved member of the congregation died. This year Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II both ended grueling battles with death with cameras rolling. As I come home, I realize that in the wake of these public marches to death, the ground has shifted.

Before I am engulfed by the demands of being home, I have the luxury of surveying this new ground. The irony of Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II sharing a week of headlines is captivating. As young people, both Schiavo and John Paul flirted with death. Schiavo's dance was naive, the result of an undiagnosed eating disorder. Eating disorders are epidemic in our weight obsessed culture, and they are deadly. John Paul also spent his early years dancing with death, but dancing with intention as he stood in opposition to the communist regime of his native Poland. He survived and even flourished. But in recent weeks death came back for both Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II, this time making them both commodities in a media market, slaves to our passion to understand the fault-line between life and death. We witnessed day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, their agonizing journey across that line.

While I would like this new ground to be one of certitude, it is not. As I watch families face death in a quagmire of medical choices, I am sure of very little. Each situation is unique and the choices are overwhelming. The emotionally exhausting work of carving a path is humbling and I envy the certitude proclaimed by so many in these weeks. From my perch, I can say with righteousness that I would never consent to a feeding tube and that I am awed by Michael Schiavo's commitment. But I'm not lying in the bed, nor is my daughter, nor my beloved. My platitudes are nothing more than Monday morning quarterbacking. From my armchair, the publicized suffering of the Pope in these last days was horrific and unmerciful. Medical intervention can go too far. But I'm not in Rome and cannot understand as the Romans can.

Where I am is back home facing the ironies that have fallen out of the closet in my absence. While the cameras have focused on the fault line, a growing tide of vulnerable Americans, still on the side of life, are losing their access to even basic health care. Where are their cameras? What does it mean when the "insured" (read: financially advantaged) get state of the art healthcare that is the envy of the world while the working poor in this country can't even get reliable asthma medication? Where is righteousness when "life" is defined by the intake of breath and compassion is expendable?

As I recycle the piled newspapers left from last week's vacation, I am certain that the ground has shifted, but neither righteousness nor certitude is apparent. The ground I left a week ago no exists, ironies clamor with new harmonies, change is the constant. If I dare to embrace this shifting ground, the value of the moment becomes clear. And this moment? A moment to revel in the afternoon sun, a moment to listen to a child, a moment to contact my legislators - even if the cameras aren't rolling.

And yes, a moment of gratitude that the fault lines of my own life remain mercifully shadowed.