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

The Kairos of Gaming: Of Games and God, Part II

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Last night I opened the “Minecraft game saves” folder on my laptop, dropped my latest Minecraft world onto a flashdrive, and then proceeded to clean out the whole folder, every save, every backup, every screenshot. All of it went to that great digital recycling bin in the sky.

Then I gave said flash drive to my wife and told her to hide it somewhere in the house, with strict instructions that, however much I might beg her to do otherwise, she should not return it until Christmas.

I feel—and probably sound—somewhat pathetic making this confession, but it’s true. I have been wanting to focus more of my energy on writing, have felt called to do this in fact, and the plain truth of the matter is this: that left to my own devices, I would pour far more time than I have to spare into the enjoyable, but otherwise unproductive business of mining and crafting, leaving far too little left over to do what I really want to do, which is to write.

I am not sharing all this simply for absolution, however. It’s more to point out our first landmark in the “theology of gaming” we started journeying towards in my last post. It is, I think, both the best starting place for discussing video games from a theological perspective, and, interestingly, the strongest theological objection to gaming as a human activity, at the same time.

I’m thinking here of the way video games consume time.

Let me start with the theological objection. I mentioned in a previous post that the two main games I’ve spent my time playing over the last decade have been Minecraft and Skyrim. Skyrim, if you haven’t heard, is a Tolkeinesque fantasy role-playing game, set in a vast and intricately detailed open kingdom known as Skyrim, a province of the imaginary world of Tamriel. It’s basically a living, breathing Dungeons and Dragons fantasy, complete with elves, orcs, giants, and demons. Your main job in Skyrim is to advance through the story-line, completing quests and conquering foes, until you acquire both the skills and the spells necessary to defeat an apocalyptic, world-eating dragon named Alduin, and so become the fabled Dragonborn.



Skyrim is available through a video game distribution service called Steam. This is handy, because whenever you log onto Steam, it tracks the number of hours you’ve spent playing any given game in your account. Consequently, I can tell you with great precision that, since embarking on my very first quest in Skyrim, I have logged no less than 539 hours playing the game.

539 is a lot of hours. If I had played them all in a row I’d have been playing for 22 straight days. If it was a full-time career, I would have already been 3 months on the job. And that’s only counting the hours I played over Steam (you can also play off-line), and it’s only counting the hours I spent playing Skyrim—who knows what my stats would look like if I included all my Minecrafting into the equation.

There is a place in the Psalms where the psalmist cries out to the Lord, “Teach us O Lord to number our days.” The idea, of course, is that the number of our days is, in fact, remarkably small. Three score and ten years—or, 613,200 hours—is all the Psalmist gives us. Subtract 8 hours a day for sleep, and that leaves us with only 408,800 left over. If I kept going at my Skyrim rate, I would burn up almost 10,000 of those playing video games.

This would probably be tragic, because after 539 hours of play, all I have to show for my efforts in the world of Skyrim is a series of pointless achievements in a video game, a fully levelled-up wood elf warrior, and an imaginary chest full of digital treasures that I can literally do nothing with.

Enthusiasts would want to pump the breaks here, and argue that there are all kinds of benefits that come from gaming-- social, emotional, intellectual, and so on-- but even so, from a strict "productivity" point of view, time spent playing video games is, in fact, time mostly wasted.

But that, as I say, is not only the greatest objection to video games, it is also the greatest starting place for thinking about them theologically. Video games, after all, remind us that time need not always be spent productively in order for it to be spent well. There are some activities, actually, that are inherently valuable and intrinsically worth doing.

In order to appreciate this, we need to consider the function of play in human experience. A video game is, first and foremost, just that: a thing to be played; and any theology of gaming, if it is going to explain the phenomenon accurately, will have to first develop a working theology of play. In his study of human play, Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga suggested that there were three specific factors that made an activity playful, anthropologically speaking. First, the activity must be voluntary; second, it must follow a scripted logic; and third, it must stand apart in time and space from all other activities. Video games, of course, meet all three of these requirements, but its this third that I wish to focus on here.

Something happens to time and space when a video game launches—a kind of suspended animation—and the player enters into a time and space entirely set apart. This is why, at the height of my Skyrim days, I could start a quest at 9:00 in the evening, and before I knew it the whole household was sleeping, it was 2:00 in the morning, and as far as I could tell, less than ten minutes had passed. There are other forms of play that have this same effect on me—reading fiction can sometimes do it—but few activities, I think, open us up to a “time set apart” the way video gaming does.

In God in the Machine, Liel Leibovitz argues that this is one of the great sociological gifts that video games give us, the ability, as he calls it, to waste time. “Speaking of video games,” he says, “parents, educators, and other responsible adults frequently and often sneeringly label them a waste of time. They are right, but for all the wrong reasons. Video games do waste time, but not mindlessly, never wantonly. They waste time in a way necessary to curb the otherwise rampant industriousness of developed capitalist societies, necessary to solve the central problem of the medium, namely how not to force humans, thoroughly analog creatures that we are, into digital mind-sets, bound by code and devoid of free will.”

In other words, video games allow us to escape the modern utilitarian view of "spending time"—the “time is money” philosophy of the modern world—that operates continually on the assumption that an activity is only worth doing if there is “something to show for it” at the end. To the extent that “to sanctify” something means “to set it aside for a special purpose,” video games give us a sense of what it means to experience “sanctified time.” Kairos is the word theologians sometimes use to describe “sanctified time,” and often kairos is held in tension with chronos, or chronological time. Kairos is time set-apart, time that has no utilitarian purpose, time that unfolds in some way parallel to chronological time, and is valuable not because of what you can do with it, but because of what it does to you.

In pointing all this out, it needs to be squarely faced that there is, surprisingly very little discussion of play whatsoever in the Scriptures. Unlike the ancient Greeks, the ancient Israelites did not seem to have any sporting events; nor are there any depictions of any Bible characters playing at anything. It is true that Jesus pointed out children as exemplars for life in the Kingdom, but that was clearly because of their humility, not their playfulness.

However important it may be for human development and well-being, the Bible largely ignores play.

But that may be because the Bible has in full what all our playfulness can only hint at: the truest doorway onto kairos time, and the only thing really worth wasting our chronos on: the act of Biblical worship.

I use the word “waste” very carefully here. After all, there is nothing at all “wasteful” about worshiping God. It is the one thing we were made for, the trajectory of the Christian life, and that thing we will be doing when time is finally, fully “set apart” and we are with him for eternity.

There is nothing wasteful about worship.

But, in the strictest sense—the capitalistic, utilitarian, means-to-an-end sense—there is nothing “practical” about it, either. The very first sacrifice described in the Book of Leviticus is the whole burnt offering, which the worshiper offers voluntarily, as an expression of thanks and devotion to the Lord. It doesn’t start with the atoning sacrifices, which are “used” to deal with the problem of our sin. It doesn’t start with the sacrifices “used” to expiate our uncleanness. It starts with the one that you give for no other reason than that you want to worship God, and all you get out of it is the joy of having worshiped. With some sacrifices, of course, you got to keep the meat, or at least a portion of it, and eat it with your friends and family. Not so the whole-burnt offering. The goat, or lamb, or bull, or pigeon, went on the altar, and went entirely up in smoke, so that no portion of it could be “used” for any other purpose.

We see this at work, too, in the Biblical command to practice Sabbath. Sabbath time is the most fully set-apart time of all, and it is—again speaking from a strictly capitalistic perspective—useless time. Sure, you could argue that resting one day in seven makes you more productive for the other six, but that is never the justification the Scriptures give for keeping Sabbath. We are to do it simply to mark how God set us free from slavery (Deuteronomy 5:12), and how God himself created the world (Exodus 20:11). Sabbath-time, in other words, assures us that however productive we may think we are, still all the work in the world won’t sustain the world. That’s God’s job; and because he has pledged himself to do this job, he does not exact from us a factory-efficient accounting of what we produced with every second.

Video games, of course, are not worship. A legalist might go so far as to argue that video games can leads us into false worship; and they may have a point. All I am trying to argue here is that gaming is an expression of a deeply seeded desire in us to escape into kairos time, where chronos is suspended for just a moment, and time itself can be well-wasted. However imperfectly video gaming expresses this desire, I think the Bible would say that the desire itself tells us something about human nature before God.

We were made to worship. And when we are worshiping we are entering into that experience which all the video games in the world hint at, perhaps, but none of them ever fully achieve: a time and space fully set apart, where we are doing the one thing that has no capitalistic utility but makes us most fully human: coming to know God, so that we might enjoy him forever.

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