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

From the Beginning: A Devotional Commentary on Genesis (XIV)

In Genesis 27 we have the story of how Jacob tricked his father Isaac into giving him his brother's blessing.  Over the course of the many thousands of years that this story's been told and re-told, the profound drama that’s going on here has maybe worn a bit smooth for us. Jacob has just perpetrated the most appalling fraud imaginable (really: imagine tricking your blind father, on his death bed, into signing a forged will that gives you the whole inheritance and cuts your brother out of the deal...) an appalling fraud, like I say, instigated by his own mother, who loved him more than his brother (again, try to imagine it...), and immediately after this, while Isaac his father is sitting there blindly assuming that he’s just blessed Esau, it says, “Jacob had hardly gone out from the presence of his father when Esau came in from his hunting...”

When you slow down to visualize this scene, the tension is almost palpable: the liar leaves just as the hot-head arrives. What stands out to me in all of this is just how messed up Jacob’s family is. A mom who hates one son and loves the other, two brothers who despise each other, one a bully, the other a cheat, a weakened dad caught in the middle: it’s the quintessential dysfunctional family.

But maybe there’s good news, here, too, because this is the family that will give birth to God’s Redemptive History. It will start, in fact, with them, and it won’t stop until their great-great-great-great-fifty-times-great Grand Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, sprouts beautiful from their family tree. Of course, Isaac’s family is hardly the only dysfunctional family in history (not by a long-shot), but if God could bring Jesus out their messed up family, what can’t he do with ours, if we will give them to him?

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