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

Three Minute Theology 1.2, The Trinity in 3D



Christians sometimes use the word “mystery” to describe certain aspects of their faith. God coming to us as a human being in the Incarnation is a mystery; so is the way Jesus could be both fully God and fully human.

When Christians use the term Mystery, they don’t mean it in the Sherlock Holmes sense of the word—as in, a puzzle to be solved, or a secret to be discovered. A “mystery” is a truth about God that is apparently contradictory, which human reason could never arrive at on its own, and we could only know because God revealed it to us.

The Trinity is a Mystery in this sense of the word. Like all Mysteries of our Faith, there is no perfect “analogy” for the Trinity—no perfect way to represent humanly how God is One single God and at the same time, three distinct Persons.

Sometimes people will compare the Trinity to an egg, which is a single thing, and yet it has three parts—a shell, a yolk and a white. This analogy fails, however, in that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not just three “parts” of one God, they are three distinct persons.

Sometimes people use the analogy of water, which is one single substance but can appear in three distinct forms—ice, liquid and steam. This analogy fails, too, in that the same water can’t be ice, liquid and steam, at the same time, whereas the three Persons of the Trinity are not just three different “forms” of the same God, but three distinct Persons existing at the same time.

All analogies are bound to fail, but there is a way to imagine how something could be both three distinct things and at the same time, one single thing.

Imagine a world that only exists in two dimensions. There is backwards and forwards, left and right, but there is no up or down. The inhabitants of this world are all flat, two dimensional shapes—circles, squares and so on. They have no knowledge of the third dimension, and no frame of reference for conceiving of “up” or “down.”

Now imagine that a three-dimensional being like myself entered this flat world—maybe I reached three fingers of my hand in, for instance.

My hand, of course, is one single thing, but as it enters into the 2-dimensional world, what will all those 2 dimensional creatures experience?

Won’t they perceive it as three separate circles?

Three 2-dimensional shapes that are completely separate and distinct, and, as far as they can tell, not attached in any way? You can go around each of them, and each of them can move separately.

But what if you or I, who exist in three-dimensional space, were explain to our 2-D friends that what these three distinct circles are really one single hand—and if they could only get “up” above their two-dimensional world, they would understand how these three circles are, at the exact same time, One?

Wouldn’t they say, “What’s ‘Up?’”

Would they even have a frame of reference for making sense of a statement like this, that the three circles they very clearly see are separate, are, at the same time, one single Thing?

This is not really an analogy for the Trinity itself, as much as it is an analogy for how the Trinity is a Mystery. God, if he is indeed the Creator of the Universe, must exist in dimensions further beyond us than the third dimension is beyond our imaginary 2-dimensional world.

And though there is no way for 3-dimensional beings like us to conceive of how God could be Three distinct Persons and at the same time One Single God, it’s certainly not a blind leap of Faith to accept it that he is.

At any rate, after their encounter with Jesus, whom they worshipped as God, and after their filling with the Holy Spirit, whom they experienced as God, this what the first Christians came to believe: that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God, now and forever.

0 comments: