Books by Dale Harris

Books by Dale Harris
A Feast of Epiphanies

Though I Walk, A Novel

Daytime Moons and Other Celestial Anomalies, a book of poems

Second Wind

Second Wind
An album of songs both old and new. Recorded in 2021, a year of major transition for me, these songs explore the many vicissitudes of the spiritual life,. It's about the mountaintop moments and the Holy Saturday sunrises, the doors He opens that no one can close, and those doors He's closed that will never open again. You can click the image above to give it a listen.

The Song Became a Child

The Song Became a Child
A collection of Christmas songs I wrote and recorded during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. Click the image to listen.

There's a Trick of the Light I'm Learning to Do

This is a collection of songs I wrote and recorded in January - March, 2020 while on sabbatical from ministry. They each deal with a different aspect or expression of the Gospel. Click on the image above to listen.

Three Hands Clapping

This is my latest recording project (released May 27, 2019). It is a double album of 22 songs, which very roughly track the story of my life... a sort of musical autobiography, so to speak. Click the album image to listen.

Ghost Notes

Ghost Notes
A collections of original songs I wrote in 2015, and recorded with the FreeWay Musical Collective. Click the album image to listen.

inversions

Recorded in 2014, these songs are sort of a chronicle of my journey through a pastoral burn-out last winter. They deal with themes of mental-health, spiritual burn-out and depression, but also with the inexorable presence of God in the midst of darkness. Click the album art to download.

soundings

soundings
click image to download
"soundings" is a collection of songs I recorded in September/October of 2013. Dealing with themes of hope, ache, trust and spiritual loss, the songs on this album express various facets of my journey with God.

bridges

bridges
Click to download.
"Bridges" is a collection of original songs I wrote in the summer of 2011, during a soul-searching trip I took out to Alberta; a sort of long twilight in the dark night of the soul. I share it here in hopes these musical reflections on my own spiritual journey might be an encouragement to others: the sun does rise, blood-red but beautiful.

echoes

echoes
Prayers, poems and songs (2005-2009). Click to download
"echoes" is a collection of songs I wrote during my time studying at Briercrest Seminary (2004-2009). It's called "echoes" partly because these songs are "echoes" of times spent with God from my songwriting past, but also because there are musical "echoes" of hymns, songs or poems sprinkled throughout the album. Listen closely and you'll hear them.

Accidentals

This collection of mostly blues/rock/folk inspired songs was recorded in the spring and summer of 2015. I call it "accidentals" because all of the songs on this project were tunes I have had kicking around in my notebooks for many years but had never found a "home" for on previous albums. You can click the image to download the whole album.

random reads

Saul, Empire, and the Reign of God

The other night my wife read me 2 Samuel 21:1-14. Then she looked at me with a furrowed brow and said: "What was that all about?" Three years of famine diverted by the execution of seven male descendants of Saul. Rizpah sitting in sackcloth next to their exposed bodies, scattering the carrion birds until the rains came. David gathering up their bones with the bones of Saul and Jonathan, burying them at last in the tomb of Saul's father Kish. And it's only after all this dark business that God again answers prayer in behalf of the land.

My brow furrowed, too.

We talked through it a bit, and this is the only help I could offer: God withholds the rain specifically because Saul tried to annihilate the Gibeonites. Saul had broken an ancient oath that Israel swore with them under Joshua. Though God had forbidden all such treaties when Israel entered the land, he still holds them to their ill-sworn word, hundreds of years later. And the all-too-human events inevitably play themselves out: Gibeon asks for blood.

And so we witness the final ignoble end of Saul's dynasty. You can almost hear the stone grind shut against the tomb door. Israel had asked for a king "such as all the other nations have," and God gave them exactly what they asked for: a reign of bitter tribalism, broken oaths and violent self-assertion, like all the other nations have. And this is where that trajectory of human empire-building finally clatters still: in the heart-wrenching cries of a bereaved mother, chasing the ravens off the rotting corpse of her son. The utter anti-shalom of an anti-Messiah.

But the Word is whispering at the back of her ominous cries. Because we have tasted the true shalom of the true Messiah, and its trajectory is the exact inverse of Saul's: loving self-giving, perfectly fulfilled oaths, and people of every tribe and tongue sitting down together at the table of fellowship. And his is the only reign the people of God can confess.

I recently read a blogger comment that during the Bush administration, Christians published a remarkable number of books critiquing the evangelical church's acquiescence to American imperialistic ideology. His point was not that these critiques were wrong, but that they had such an easy target in President Bush. He wondered- and I wonder with him- if the same critics will be so vigilant against imperialism under a new presidential leadership, especially when the new seems such better candidate for hope than the old (or were they just disguising crass distaste for Bush in the high-sounding rhetoric of anti-imperialism all along?)

May the Word in 2 Samuel 21:1-14 remind us deeply of what human empire building looks like; and what the reign of God's Messiah most emphatically does not look like.

May he convict us of our own petty tribalisms, oath-breakings, and violent self-assertions.

And may he in turn teach us to name these in any human empire that tempts us to seek a king such as all the other nations have.

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