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

Bonhoeffer, Mediation, Incarnation and Christmas

A few posts back I quoted Deitrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together. In dredging up that quote, I went back to an old paper from Seminary that I wrote on the Chirstology of Bonhoeffer. Re-perusing what I'd written, I was struck by how Bonhoeffer's emphasis on the Mediation of Christ challenges us to reflect on the true true meaning of Christmas"--in a way that no Charlie Brown's Christmas special ever could.

Looking ahead to the celebration of God's Being With Us in the Person of Jesus, I offer a few quotes from that paper here as a little "Christmas fruit cake" for thought. (Fruit cake, that is, because of its density. What can I say: I was in my 2nd year of Seminary when I wrote it.)

In Ethics, Bonhoeffer argues that because of Jesus it is no longer possible for us to “think in terms of two spheres,” the divine and the worldly, the holy and the profane, the Christian and the un-Christian, but only the single reality of the world-reconciled-to-God-in-Christ. “Whoever professes to believe in the reality of Jesus Christ, as the revelation of God,” he writes, “must in the same breath profess his faith in both the reality of God and the reality of the world; for in Christ he finds God and the world reconciled.” Elsewhere he makes these two realities inseparable, claiming that: "In Christ we are offered the possibility of partaking in the reality of God and in the reality of the world, but not in the one without the other. The reality of God discloses itself only by setting me entirely in the reality of the world, and when I encounter the reality of the world it is always already sustained, accepted and reconciled in the reality of God.”

So it is that in his reconciliation of the whole world to God, Christ makes a claim over the whole of life: “It is as whole men, who think and act, that we are loved by God and reconciled with God in Christ. And it is as whole men, who think and act, that we love God and our brothers.” Christ’s claim over the whole of life precludes the possibility of withdrawing from the world, rather it sends us out into the single reality of the-world-reconciled-to-God-in-Christ, proclaiming this reality to the world: “The world is to be called to this, its reality in Christ ... It must be claimed for Him who has won it by His incarnation, His death and His resurrection.”

... Bonhoeffer’s claim that Christ is the one who brings the reality of the world and the reality of God together can only be understood in light of his conception of Christ as the centre, the mediator between God and humanity and between humans and the world. The centrality of Christ is a continuous theme throughout his work. For Bonhoeffer, Christ the reconciler is the mediator and centre of all reality: “The figure of the Reconciler, of the God-man Jesus Christ, comes between God and the world and fills the centre of all history. In this figure the secret of the world is laid bare, and in this figure there is revealed the secret of God.”

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