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

On Fixed and Floating Land

A month or so ago I was sitting on a quiet patio in the cool of the evening in small town Saskatchewan, talking with some friends about the ebb and flow of the Christian life. We were talking about things like finishing our studies, and our search for new ministry contexts, and friends going to distant parts of the world, and moves, and change, and newness, and this thought suddenly struck me that I'm still mulling over.

There's a kind of holy restlessness, it seems, pulsing at the heart of Christian communities.

I tried to put it into words then, and the best I could get at was that image of a "holy restlessness." Our God is a missionary God. He's a sending God. A Father who's constantly seeking; a Son who keeps making things new; a Spirit who blows wherever he wills. And this God, holy and restless, is constantly on the move, constantly sending, seeking, renewing and sending again.

I think that as Christian communities, we'll know we're really beating with the rhythm of this God's heart, because we'll find in our midst the same kind of holy restlessness: an impulse to send, and seek, and renew, and send again. An impulse that moves us to laugh with each other all the more richly, to weep with each other all the more deeply, to embrace each other all the more warmly, because we don't know when or how the sending God might send us out once again.

The tendency, of course, is rootedness. Cain wandered east and built a city; Noah was so named in the hope that he might give the harried Sons of Adam rest; Lot pitched his tent in the plain outside Sodom and settled down there.

But Abraham-- and the seed of Abraham in him-- answered God's call to become an alien and stranger in the world. Abraham, the patriarch of Faith, embraced a life of holy restlessness.

Perhaps one of the most vivid descriptions I've ever read of this is in C. S. Lewis' science fiction novel, Voyage to Venus. Lewis portrays the planet Venus as a world entirely untouched by death, inhabited by a sinless King and Queen. Aside from small spots of 'Fixed Land,' the entire surface of this perfect world is covered by ocean. The extraterrestrial Adam and Eve of this new Eden inhabit 'floating Islands' that drift wholly at the mercy of the waves. The Queen explains to Dr. Ransom, the hero of the novel, that God has forbidden them to dwell on the Fixed Lands: “We may land on them and walk on them. . . . But not stay there—not sleep there…"

As the story unfolds, a diabolical villain tempts this Eve to taste the forbidden fruit of living on the Fixed Land, arguing, “This law stands between you and settled life, all command of your own days." But after the temptation has been resisted and the evil overcome, Eve realizes the true grace of the law. In a passage that has always rung hauntingly profound for me, she explains: “The reason for not living on the Fixed Land is plain. … Why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure—to be able on one day to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me? It isto reject the wave—to take my hands out of God’s, to say to Him, ‘Not thus but thus’—to put in our own power what times should roll towards us.”


Well, these things are on my mind a lot these days, perhaps for obvious reasons. But I think it's a lesson God is calling me to learn all over again: what does it mean to choose to live on the floating island of His will? What does it mean to refuse the alluring self-determination of the Fixed Land?

What does it mean to embrace the holy restlessness of the Christian life?

1 comments:

Jon Coutts said...

I suppose there is a time to plant and a time to uproot, but ... yeah.

I imagine there is a difference between "settling", in the active, supportive, adventurous, planting sense, and "settling", in the passive, self-engrossed, over-contented, self-feeding sense.

The second blog reference to Voyage to Venus/Perelandra I've read this week. Awesome.

Good to have you back! Glad to hear you've arrived and are, it seems, in full swing!