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 Mark of the Passover and the Mark of the Beast, a biblical observation

The other day during my devotional reading I happened to read Revelation 15:1-16:11 for my New Testament passage and Exodus 13:11-20 for my Old Testament passage. I just read a little bit of the New Testament and a little bit of the Old Testament each day, so these two passages had not been hand picked to go together or anything.  Even so, I noticed a fascinating connection between the two that I’d never seen before.

In Revelation 16:2 you get a reference to that most notorious of biblical images, the “mark of the Beast,"  a symbolic number that anyone who "followed the Beast" received to indicate their allegiance (Revelation 13:11-18). The specific identity of the Beast has dogged interpreters for millennia, but for today, let's just say that whatever else it is, the Beast in Revelation represents the idolatrous genus of the Roman Empire. By extrapolation, the Beast stands as a symbol for the diabolical impulse underlying every idolatrous empire-building project ever concocted by the human heart, from well before Rome, to millennia after it.

There’s far more going on here than can be unpacked in a 400 word blogpost, of course, but let me put it like this, at least: to receive “the mark of the Beast” is to offer unquestioned, unequivocal service and devotion to the “power structures” of this world (economic? political? technological? etc.), offering them the service and devotion that’s rightly due to God, and doing it, in particular, because of the personal benefits and/or power they give you in exchange.

But here's where it gets interesting, because the “mark of the Beast,” in Revelation’s imagery was a number you received specifically “on your hand and on your forehead,” indicating that you belonged to It. This is old news for some, maybe, but here’s the fascinating connection: in Exodus 13, God is rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt (Egypt, you might say is an earlier manifestation of the same Imperialistic Beast that Revelation has in mind).  But in Exodus 13:9, as he's breaking his people free from Egypt, God gives them the Passover feast as a memorial of their liberation, and then he says: "This observance (the Passover) will be like a sign on your hand and a reminder on your forehead” (13:9).

The human author of Exodus, of course, didn’t have Revelation in mind when he wrote that, but it’s all kinds of likely that the author of Revelation had Exodus in mind, when he suggested that choosing to serve the power structures of the World is sort of like taking an evil Beast’s “number” on your hand and your forehead. Because for the people of God, that spacethe forehead and the handwas reserved exclusively for God's mark of liberation.  And when we hold these two passages up together like this, we are profoundly reminded that the space on our hand and our forehead (symbolic maybe of our thought life and our actions?) is never blank. Either the world’s name is written there or the Lord’s name is written there, but it can’t be both and it can’t be neither.

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