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

Entrusted of the Lord, a devotional thought

There's a spot in the Gospel of John, chapter 2, that I've always wondered about. In 2:24-25, we’re told that Jesus was in Jerusalem performing “miraculous signs” and many were believing because of what they’d seen. And then it says, “but Jesus did not ‘entrust’ himself to them, because he knew all people.” That's the part that keeps me wondering, in particular, because it’s not exactly clear what it means when it says that Jesus did not “entrust himself” to these people. The Greek verb it uses is pisteuo, which means “to believe.” It is, incidentally, the same verb in 23, when it says many "believed in him" because of his miraculous signs. They pisteuo-ed in him, but he did not, in turn pisteuo himself to them.

As strange as it may sound to say it like this, it seems there is a necessary “entrusting of himself to us” that Jesus does when we come into relationship with him, a reciprocal “faith” (for lack of a better word) that Jesus places in us, trusting us as his followers, and entrusting us with his own self-revelation and life. 

The immediate reason the text gives, for why Jesus did not do this for the people in this passage, is that their faith in him was superficial and self-interested. They believed simply because they'd seen the miraculous signs he’d performed and ostensibly were looking for more (v.23); and Jesus was intimately aware of their self-centred motives, inasmuch as he "knew all people" (v.24).  

To extrapolate a spiritual truth from the text, we might say that when our faith in him is like thissuperficial and self-interestedJesus does not reciprocate and entrust to us the deep things of God, the deep intimacy he wants to have with us. He certainly did not do so for the people in this passage. They trusted in him only superficially, so He did not entrust himself deeply to them.

Surely there is a caution here, and a challenge. We are being urged here, I think, to nurture that kind of faith in the Lord Jesus that is not based on the next flashy miracle and what’s in it for me, but is based instead on deeply knowing Jesus as he is, and receiving him for who he is. I’m reading between the lines, of course, but this kind of faith, it seems, is the kind that our Lord honours reciprocally by entrusting himself to us, in turn.

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