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

And Shall Death Indeed Have No Dominion?

Dylan Thomas has always haunted my imagination as the quintessential poet. His wonder at the weight of words, his prophetic pronouncements and paradoxes, his mystical bardic vision, his sonorous voice-- each are subtle shades of light shifting in the aura that surrounds this legendary Welsh poet. Even the sad trajectory of his later life lends a kind of glimmer and shadow to his verse. He once said of himself, "I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my inquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression." The quintessential poet.

If you've never yet encountered the poetry of Dylan Thomas, I'd invite you to listen for the "bardic vision" in a poem like "And Death Shall Have No Dominion."

So I've been thinking about Dylan Thomas quite a bit lately; mostly because I'm tempted these days to mourn the death of the word in the Evangelical pulpit. Please understand: this is not some typical modernist, "We've stopped preaching the Word," kind of rant-- I'm not simply lamenting the death of "Biblical Absolutes"-- And I'm not waxing nostalgic for the good-ol'- "Thus Sayeth the Lord"-days. What I'm talking about here is the absence of poetically poignant words in our preaching. The laden images and compelling music and evocative ambiguities of the poetic word seem to have no place next to the clinical, linear, utilitarian three-pointer that is the modern sermon. Somewhere we seem to have lost the conviction that the spoken word-- the poetic word-- not only communicates Truth but actually particpiates in it in a powerful way. As someone once put it: "the content is all there, but we might as well be giving the weather report."

And my heart often aches over what we might call a dominion of dead words in the pulpit.

And when it does, I think of Dylan Thomas. He once said that a primary influence in his poetry was "the great biblical rhythms that had rolled over him from the Welsh pulpits of his youth." I've referred to the Welsh tradition of powerful "pulpit oratory" elsewhere, but here's the thing: by his own admission, the "headlong rhetoric," the "powerful imaginative strength," and the "mystical, religious vision," that he heard sounding from the Welsh pulpit as a child taught Dylan Thomas the bardic rhythms and word-wonder of the poet.

The pulpit once taught the poet about the weight of the spoken word.

And I wonder sometimes if the pulpit must now ask the poet to return the favor.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

As William Willimon puts it, "The prophets of Israel were poets who were preachers, preachers who were poets. They deconstructed old worlds and envisioned new worlds, with some of the pushiest, poetic, figurative, and powerful speech ever uttered, all on the basis of nothing by words." (Willimon, Proclamation and Theology, 11)

But Willimon also warns us that though preaching uses all the rhetorical devices one has at hand, "none of these devices is at the heart of what preaching is up to. At the heart of preaching is either a God who speaks, and who speaks now, in the sermon, or preaching is silly." (Ibid., 2).