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

Meeting Mr. and Mrs. Prophesy (The Meaning of Marriage, Part III)

Sitting in the dentist’s chair while your teeth are being cleaned isn’t the best of places to start expounding on the meaning of marriage anyway, but even so, this one caught me a bit off guard.

It was a new dental clinic for me—we’d only recently moved to the community—so the dental hygienist and I were just getting to know one another.  Mostly, of course, I was getting to know her.  It was, after all, hard for me to do much of the talking, what with that spotlight in my eyes and my tongue pushed back by a dental mirror; but no matter, she was valiantly keeping up enough conversation for the both of us. 

“What did I do?”

Between rinses I explained I was a pastor.  This intrigued her, and she shared some of her perspectives on the church. 

“Did I do weddings?”  My tongue held back by the dental implements again, I did my best to indicate I did.

And before I knew it, my newly-acquainted dental hygienist was sharing the story of her first marriage that didn’t make it, and why it failed—not sharing any details unbecoming a professional, to be sure, but certainly more than I was expecting.  And then she described her new partner, and how different he was from her first.

Between rinses I said something or other about her “new husband ” before propping my mouth open again for inspection.

“Oh, we’re not married,” she said, peering in.  And then quietly, but more resolutely, she added, “I don’t need a piece of paper to prove I’m committed to this relationship.”

Like I say, the dentist’s chair isn’t the best place to start in on a theology of marriage; and she was scraping my teeth with steel at the time, so I didn’t feel much able to contradict her, even if I’d wanted to.  But if I could have spoken freely, I probably would have said something like:  “I agree with you that marriage is far more than just a piece of paper… it’s certainly more than that …  but still, it’s not less than that, is it?”

And then, if we were sitting over coffee, maybe, and we’d gotten to know one another better than you can, really, in a dentist chair, and she’d asked me: “Well then, theologically speaking, what is marriage?” (Because, after all, aren’t these the kind of questions everyone asks over coffee?)  I would have said: “Well, as a Christian, I believe that marriage is a kind of prophecy.”

This might catch both of us off guard—Christian marriage is a kind of prophecy—so I’d hasten to explain. In the Bible, when the prophets want to talk about God’s love for his people, his faithfulness to them and his determination to stick with them through thick or thin—with them as a people, mind you, not as individuals—one of the regular images they use is of a husband’s faithful love for his wife.   In Jeremiah it says it like this:  “Return to me, says the Lord, for I am married to you..”  In Isaiah it says it like this: “Your Maker is your husband, the Lord of Hosts is his name.”  And, of course, the whole entire book of Hosea is built around this picture.  The Lord is, spiritually speaking, betrothed to his people.

This prophetic tradition, of using marriage imagery to describe God’s love for his people, gets picked up and amplified in the New Testament, where one of the central images is the Great Wedding Feast at the End of the Age, when Jesus returns and is intimately united with his people.  Jesus uses it in his teaching, asking us to imagine the Kingdom of Heaven like a King who gives a wedding feast for his son.  Paul uses it, like when he tells the Corinthian Church that he has promised them to “one bridegroom” and will do all he can to present them to him, holy and pure.  And of course, the great, final crescendo of the Good Book uses it, when John of Patmos hears the angels in the Book of Revelation say:  “Let us rejoice and give him glory, for the Wedding of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready!”

In the Scriptures then, the exclusive, permanent, faithful covenant bond between husband and wife is actually a sort of prophetic object lesson for that final day.  Prophetic, in that, whenever we glimpse a man and a woman sticking by each other for better or for worse, it points beyond itself, to God’s greater, higher, purer determination to stick by us for better or for worse.  And prophetic too, in that, as imperfect and human as the marriage covenant is, it is still, at its best, a reminder of the coming consummation of all things, when the faithful in Christ will take their place in the Wedding Banquet of the Lamb, and God’s covenant love will reign beautifully and fully in every heart.
         
In their daily, mundane, earthy growing together in covenant love, the married couple is actually, biblically, a prophetic couple, reminding us, even if incompletely, of what is (God’s covenant love) and what is yet to be (the consummation of all things in Christ).

I’m not really sure what my dental hygienist would have said to all that, if I’d managed to squeeze it out between rinsings, but more and more these days I think Christian husbands and wives would do well to regain the prophetic aspect of a godly marriage, and with it a conscious awareness that their life together can, at its best, bear witness to something true about God’s heart for us.  

If we did, I think we would not only find deeper, more profound meaning in our daily decisions to make it work when making it work takes all we’ve got, but more than that, we’d find ourselves with a prophetic word to speak to the broader culture.  Because this is about a different way of being as much as it is about a different perspective on marriage; it's about being "us" centred and focused on the "yet to come," in a world that is increasingly self-centred and focused on the instant gratification of the here and now.

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