Ironic Advent 2016 Meditation #18: Old Advent

Ben Camino's Ironic Advent 2016 Meditation #18: 

Old Advent*

Advent is for the Old.

Well, Mary was young. 
Too young if you ask me.
But everybody else was old.
Zechariah was old,
Elizabeth was old,
Simeon was really old,
and so was Anna. 

Wait, is there someone named Anna in this story? 

If not there should be. 

Old Joseph, according to the nuns at Our Lady of Mercy, was past doing it,
Adam and the OLD Testament saints sitting down in Limbo were damn old
(they were down there before the Pope said there wasn't such a place as Limbo),
especially old Noah and Methuselah and so forth 
(if you can believe those incredible numbers).

Also, G*d was infinitely old,
Angel Gabriel was . . . what, maybe three billion years old?
Rip Van Winkle woke up and it was already Christmas,
Juh . . . Juh . . . Jimmy Shtewart was old even when he was young.

John the Baptist, too. 
I mean, yes he lept in his mother's womb but the next thing you know in the Gospels, 

just like that, he was old,
old like an Old Testament prophet,
way older than his cousin Jesus,
all shaggy and cranky and anti-social.

The old have waited too long. And they are tired.
The young can wait, despite their impatient posing.
I mean, what's another hundred years or four to them?
Just more cardboard doorways in a colorful Advent calendar,
made in Germany, with crappy non-Swiss chocolate 
behind the cute little cherubs, shepherds, lambs,
and that one wild, young star.

Advent is for the old.
Old souls that have forgotten what faith feels like,
but whose hearts hold on, somehow, like a teenager to her My-phone,
to an unrealistic ridiculous hope.

Or something like hope.

Something like a secret book, they still keep under their pillow.
Or like an angel, dressed in splendid blue or green,
no, red--
so indescribably luminous that only Chagall could really imagine or paint her.

This angel, hope, has pale blue wings, delicate breasts,
and a crescent moon shining above her,
and a too pale lover leaning miraculously down out of the frame
to whisper in her ear some surprising message,
THE MESSAGE,
the only one that matters (especially to the old)--

by Gouache, by oil, by G*d, 
by hope's delicate breasts,
by miraculous lovers leaning down and whispering tender words,

by all the nuns at Our Lady of Mercy, 
and by long dormant dreams,

all things shall be redeemed.

*For more information about Marc Chagall's painting, "The Angel and the Reader" (1930? Art Institute of Chicago), click here: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/42969/the-angel-and-the-reader