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

John Milton and the Happier Eve

To celebrate the 400th anniversary of John Milton's birth (December 6, 2008), I had planned reread Paradise Lost. I'm only just getting around to it, but I figure it's been 400 years already, so what's a few extra months?

This is actually my fourth time reading through this masterpiece of English poetry, so I'm surprised I hadn't really noticed it before. Maybe I did, but it never hit me the way it did this time: John Milton holds that Eve must have been happier in paradise than Adam. And why? Because (his Eve argues), she has the far superior Adam to enjoy, while Adam has no comparable "Adam" of his own.

In her opening speech to Adam, she says (Book IV, 444-447):

We to [God] indeed all praises owe,
And daily thanks, I chiefly, who enjoy
So far the happier lot, enjoying thee
Preeminent by so much odds, while thou [Adam]
Like consort to thyself canst nowhere find.

Unbelievable.

And, really, heart-wrenching.

Because he's done here what the Genesis story refuses to do. Milton's Adam can find no "like consort" for himself, even in Eve, though Genesis insists that the woman is precisely that: the man's "like consort" (which may be as good a translation of the Hebrew for "help meet" as any I've heard). Milton's "superior" Adam is ultimately alone, even in the company of Eve, though Genesis insists that the loneliness of superiority was the not good problem that the male-female relation had solved. Milton was a first rate poet, but, I think, a third rate theologian.

Of course, no one reads Milton anymore, but this idea-- that the primary role of the woman is to compliment the man-- is a tree with deep roots, and it still tempts the church now and then with its bitter fruit. I've talked to men, and women, who still have its juice on their lips.

But besides celebrating Milton's 400th birthday, I've been thinking a lot lately about gender identity and the Bible. Previously I suggested that the first point in any theology of gender must be the divine address and the human response that includes our selves as man or woman. After meeting Milton's lonely, superior Adam and his sad, happier Eve, I want to add a second. Theologically, I think, our gender is also defined by our open embrace of the otherness of corresponding gender.

Unlike Milton's adam then, a biblical man will embrace the otherness of the eve as full "flesh of his flesh," the like consort whose otherness truly solves the problem of his aloneness, without appealing to that otherness as a claim to lonely superiority. And unlike Milton's Eve, a biblical woman will likewise embrace the otherness of the adam, without appealing to that otherness as a claim to blissful inferiority.

Perhaps in such an embrace, men and women will discover the equality, mutuality and interdependence that Christ, the Living Word of God, holds out to his lonely, confused brothers and sisters in the Genesis story.

1 comments:

Rob Clements said...

Not sure how far you got with Milton, but this one has a parallel contemporary English (!) translation on one side:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Paradise-Lost-Parallel-Prose-Edition-John-Milton/9781573834261-item.html?ref=Search+Books%3a+%25271573834262%2527