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

A Christian Conversation about Steven Universe (Part III): We Are the Crystal Gems

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Back in 2011, when the movie X-Men First Class came out, I went to see it with a friend of mine who happens to be gay. As far as I knew, I was just taking in one more rollicking superhero romp, maybe not Academy Award worthy, but certainly worth the price of admission. My gay friend, however, had an entirely different take on the film.

“What did you think?” he asked as we were leaving the theatre.

I gave him my two-cent review: fun story, cool effects, though I’m more of an Avengers man, myself.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I thought it did a great job conveying what it feels like to be gay.”

If you’re scratching your head at that one, like I was when he said it, then maybe I should explain. One of the primary conflicts in X-Men First Class has to do with the search for a cure to the mutations that give the X-Men their powers. The feeling of being an aberrant “freak of nature” is a source of great torment for the super-powered mutants in the movie. Many of them hide, disguise, or suppress their mutations so that they can fit in with every-day society. One of the mutants, a blue-haired superhero named Beast believes he has found a way to medically “cure” their mutations and turn them into “normal” human beings; by contrast, the mutant named Magneto wants them to embrace their mutations and wage war against the human race.

The plot didn’t stand out to me on first viewing as an especially LGBTQ-themed story, but my friend helped me out. “Being gay,” he said, “in a world where everyone is straight and you don’t know if you belong, you can feel like that: like you’re a mutant with a mutation you have to hide, because if anyone knew you had it, they’d think you’re were a freak.”

It turns out that my friend was picking up on something the movie was intentionally laying down. At least, the screenwriters of X-Men First Class have since gone on the record confirming there was an intentional gay subtext to the story.

When I think back to that night watching X-Men First Class, though, two things stand out to me: one, how meaningful it was for my gay friend to see his own experience of queerness being metaphorically represented on screen like that; and two, how easily I had missed the metaphor, as a heterosexual man. That night at the theatre helped me to see my “straight world” through the eyes of someone who did not feel as though he fit into it, because the mainstream narratives of that world, where everyone found a romantic partner of the opposite sex, settled down with a family and set up a white picket-fence around it all, did not include his experience. It helped me see how painful the feeling of “being queer” can be for queer people, and how healing it can be when that pain is acknowledged.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been using the kid’s show Steven Universe as a starting point for this series on practicing hospitality for LGBTQ people in the church, because it too helps us to grasp what the “feeling of being queer” can be like for queer people. If you missed the background, let me explain that the central premise of Steven Universe is that a group of aliens called the Crystal Gems, beings that look and sound and more-or-less act just like you and I, have come to dwell among the “normal” citizens of planet earth. These aliens are really gems, whose only physical form are their gemstones, and whose anthropomorphic bodies are really projections of corporeal light that they emit.


As the show progresses, it becomes clear that the Crystal Gems are somehow meant to represent, if not the LGBTQ community, at the very least the queer experience. This is most obvious in an episode called “Rocknaldo,” (Season 4, Episode 18), where a character named Ronaldo is shown distributing pamphlets that warn the residents of Beach City about the “Rock People” living among them. The episode doesn’t dwell on this for long, and Steven quickly helps Ronaldo see the harm his pamphlets are causing, telling him that a term like “Rock People” is offensive, and that he is a Gem himself. With only a little bit of imagination, though, it’s easy to see this entire exchange as a way of exploring the problem of homophobia on a level that children would get. I may be reading too much into this, of course, but my experience with X-Men First Class suggests that even if this was not the main point of the episode, many queer people would resonate with it in this way.


If the Crystal Gems really are meant to help us to think about the queer experience, it strikes me as significant that whatever else they are, the Crystal Gems are alien. They do not fit the mainstream world of Beach City, and they frequently encounter situations that make them starkly aware of this reality. It is true that most often when this happens, and their alien natures are exposed to their human neighbors like this, the humans themselves tend to take it in stride, and life in Beach City sort of goes on more-or-less as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. This is one of the endearing quirks of the show, that the most bizarre of storylines—from intergalactic space travel to extra-terrestrial invasions—do not leave the least lasting scar on the tranquility of Beach City. It is almost as if the show is suggesting to queer kids that, yes, the feeling of “being the other” is real and painful, but however painful it may be, life on the other side of coming out will find a way of carrying on. It’s sort of like a sci-fi fantasy adventure version of the “It gets better” message.

I realize that in reading Steven Universe like this, as an allegory for the “othering” that so many queer people face, I may be guilty of “othering” myself. When I see an alien on screen and assume that the alien in question must be a metaphor for a gay person, it reveals something, perhaps, about what I really think about the gay people in my own community (do I really think they of them as “aliens”?) This is part of the brilliance of the show, however, that it holds up the mirror to all of us, queer and straight together, and asks us to re-examine what we see there.

If I am on to anything in this reading of Steven Universe, I think there is a lesson here for the Christian Church. I have written extensively on this topic before, but in a community like the Church, where the focus is almost exclusively on the family, where ministries tend to presuppose marriage as the normative way of following Jesus, and where gay people historically have not been welcome or affirmed, this feeling of “being an alien” can be intense. Like I had done with my gay friend at X-Men First Class, it is easy for Christians to under-estimate just how intense, and indeed how painful,it can be to be made to feel like “the other.”

This is why we need to hear more stories like the one Steven Universe is telling, not just imaginative ones, either, but the real stories of real gay people; and not just hear them, but authentically engage with them. Only as we are able to acknowledge and address the alienation that our “heteronormative narratives” may be causing, will we be able authentically to include gay people into the life of the church. This will take more than watching a few episodes of a kid’s cartoon, of course, but if nothing else a show like Steven Universe might help us to understand how important it is to do this well, and give us some idea of where to start.

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