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

Negative Capability and the Call of the Preacher

The famous Romantic poet John Keats once said that what made the truly great poet great was something he referred to as a "negative capability." The poetic genius, he said, can negate his or her own personality in order to enter imaginatively into the reality of the other. This "negative capability" allows the poet to "[be] in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and reason." In other words: because the poet has the imaginative capacity to negate his own personality, he can accept the paradoxes and conflicts necessary to great art without giving in to the rational impulse to resolve the tensions. According to Keats, the poet that offers us the best example of negative capability is Shakespeare, who could take "as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen," and feel no personal need to resolve the tension between the two.

Negative capability is one of those nebulous terms that most students of English literature will run into if they study it long enough. It was negative capability, Keats suggested, that allowed the poet to transcend himself and express true beauty in his work.

And I've been wondering these days if a certain kind of "negative capability" shouldn't also be a quality of preachers, too. Sometimes preachers are lauded for preaching from "where they're at," for preaching from the heart, for displaying a certain kind of personal vulnerability from the pulpit. And I get that; and in my own preaching, too, I strive for personal authenticity. But I also remember that St. Paul commended the Thessalonian church because when they received the preached Word, they accepted it "not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God." From what Paul says there (and elsewhere), the ultimate goal of preaching is the human response to the living Word of God, and emphatically not to the personalized words of the preacher.

As I struggle to figure out what that means for me as a preacher, that's when I remember Keat's negative capability.

Because when the preacher can negate his or her own personality in order to enter imaginatively into the reality of the divine other, as it is revealed in the Word she preaches-- when the preacher can "be" in the uncertainties and paradoxes of that Word without giving in to the rational impulse to personally resolve the tension she feels there-- when the preacher can exercise the imaginative capacity to negate herself in the very words she speaks-- when her preaching has this "negative capability"-- that's when she'll discover the living Word is truly speaking in her, and with her, and through her.

And that's when her gospel will come to her hearers, as Paul says, not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.

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