weight and age
Amelia Freidline

my house has been creaking and groaning lately
joints stiffened, spine misaligned
old wounds throbbing with the shift in the weather
for the first time i noticed a silver thread
among the cowlick hair shocked upright
by the scar that arcs down my head
it joins the company of others earlier earned
i am still so very young, but, when winter comes
i feel the weight of mortality in my bones.
You were my age, once upon a time
a man with wood-roughened hands
and an appearance not amounting to much
since isaiah told the story true —
yet in You eternal joy and the weight
of earthly woe were entwined
a wedding of ancient and ephemeral
fully in-personed in our frail flesh
six years away from a body broken.
so Who were you then,
Son of God and son of a table-maker?
even there i suppose You knew the words i'd write today
fumbling my way toward a greater glimpse of glory
You who of all were sinless still were subject
to a creation cursed by adam's fall
You the Light had eyesight limited by darkness
You the Healer experienced exhaustion
every fibre of our feebleness You identified with intimately
sleeping, waking, walking, eating … aging
every moment of my life You've experienced
sinless at each of the steps i stumbled down
man was made in the image of God
but God made Himself into a Man
and played the same rules He'd written for us
so You, young as You were
once also felt the weight of the world in Your bones
and You, ageless as You are
still carry it for me

Prayer

Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life:
grant us to perfectly know your Son Jesus Christ
as the way, the truth and the life, and that,
following in the footsteps of friends like Nicholas
who loved the poor, the weak and the young,
and who gave what he had to enrich those who had but little,
we may faithfully walk in the way that leads to eternal life;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock." (Matthew 7.24)

A church built on the Katskhi pillar, a natural limestone monolith near the town of Chiatura in central Georgia, approximately 40m high. The rock was long venerated by locals as a symbol of the pillar of life. The church was a medieval hermitage dating from the 9th or 10th century and was revived as a place of prayer in the 1990s and has now been restored.