"Existenzielle Fragen an christliche Themen"

Once again HitTail has provided me with a startlingly random set of search items so I thought I'd use them in a little poem.  The first in the list, 'the smiling Christ artist' refers to Johannes Wickert, whose 'Smiling Christ' we saw while in Luxembourg back in 2007.   'Brad Crowl' doesn't appear on the blog, though Brad Greenburg does, along with Brad Pitt, the animator Brad Bird, and Brad McGann, a NZ film director.  I'd never thought what the name 'Brad' might mean till now, and of course, it's a shortened form of Bradley (usually), and it means a 'broad meadow.'   So there you go. 


Here are the four search items: 

the smiling Christ artist
clippings converter
brad crowl
winnie the pooh symbolism


Another HitTail poem

Wickert's Christ smiles; 
not quite such an 
anomaly as you might expect.  


he whose paintings are 
often existential questions
on Christian themes


might well be ready to put a 
smile on the face of Christ.  
But how curious it is that  


while in the German language 
Fragen has a capital, 
in line with German nouns, 


christliche does not.  Of 
course the word's adject-
tival, but to the English 


eye, and to the average
Spellchecker, christlike sans
capital seems unkempt, 


unfinished.  


A clippings converter seems
to me the machine to translate
hedgerows into leaf litter,


or even leaf-litter-
leftover.  Brad Crowl, I 
suspect, in spite of being a 


spurious adjunct to my 
blog, seems just the man to
deal with such a shrubbery


issue, whilst contemplating, 
between conversions,
Winnie the Pooh symbolism. 
 At the same time can be found in his paintings are often a sign of hope or a new perspective. Many of his images can be understood as an existential questions on Christian theme

Inarticulate

Brad Greenburg opens a recent post with these words:

I make no secret of the fact that I prefer the written word to the spoken word.

Sure, I’m a talker. But I’m not a remarkably articulate speaker. The words just never seem to come out as neatly as they do on paper (though just how neatly they come out on paper is up for debate). And there are few things that frighten me, as a reporter, more than radio appearances. I’m always convinced that the interview to follow will be the one that ends my journalism career. Why? Because I need a filter, and real-time lacks the luxury.

This resonates greatly with me - not that I've ever done much in the way of radio interviews - though many years ago, when I was managing the bookshop, for a brief few months, perhaps, I used to get rung up by someone on Radio Rhema to do a short interview. Don't ask me now what these were about, nor why I was chosen for them. Anyway, I didn't enjoy them; my tongue would instantly knot up, and even if I prepared some material, it would all evaporate as soon as the interview started.

But ask me to write something, and I'll get a first draft done before you've finished asking, and will often have it all sussed and sorted before the deadline. Words seem to pour out of the fingers far more readily than out of the mouth....