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

Three Minute Theology 1.6: Physics and the Incarnation



In physics, a particle is an object with a specific mass and location in space—think cannonballs and baseballs, specks of dust or atoms.

A wave, on the other hand, is an oscillation of energy through matter or space: think of sunlight, or a radio wave, or your microwave oven.

In traditional physics, these two things are mutually exclusive; that is to say something is either one or the other: if it’s a particle, by its very nature it can’t be a wave, and vice versa.

But in the early 1930s, as scientists began experimenting with smaller and smaller particles, they made a mysterious discovery: at its most basic level, matter exhibits characteristics of both a wave and a particle, at the same time.  In experiments with electrons, for instance, sometimes these particles would exhibit the properties of a wave and other times the properties of a particle, depending on the method of observation. 

The term “wave-particle duality” describes this conundrum, that the most basic particles of matter have the nature of a wave and the nature of a particle at the same time, even though classically these two ideas are incompatible.  Albert Einstein put it like this:   “We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither [the wave theory nor the particle theory] fully explains the phenomena, but together they do.”

The concept of “wave-particle duality” is a helpful analogy for talking about the Incarnation—what happened, that is, when God became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. 

Christians have always maintained that in Jesus, two distinct and different natures, our human nature and God’s divine nature, came together in one person.

Traditionally, theologians have used the term hypostatic union to describe this conundrum.  Hypostasis is an ancient Greek word that means “existence” or “substance”; and the “hypostatic union” refers to the idea that two natures—the human and the divine—were united together in one individual existence: the God-man (as he’s sometimes called), Jesus Christ.

But how should we understand this?  Was Jesus some sort of half-God-half-human-hybrid?  Was he only sometimes God and other times human?  Did the coming together of the human-and-divine natures create some new, third nature that had never existed before?

 None of these suggestions will “work”; but then: what will?

And this is where the analogy of “wave-particle duality” comes in handy, because just like in the smallest particles of physics, two incompatible natures—the wave and the particle—coexist inseparably and without contradiction in a single entity; so too with Jesus Christ.

In him the divine nature and the human nature were always fully present in the same person; every activity of the human Jesus was also, at the same time, an action of God, and anything God did in, through and as Jesus Christ, was something that the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, did. 

Sometimes his human nature and other times his divine nature was more evident, depending on the “method of observation,” but even so, at his most human moments he was still fully God, and he was always fully human, even at his most divine.  

To modify what Albert Einstein said about the wave-particle duality:  “neither his human nature nor his divine nature separately explains the phenomenon of Jesus Christ, but together they do.”

This is difficult to grasp, how Jesus could be both God and human at the same time, but the ancient theologians continually stressed it as something essential to our relationship with God.

One theologian said: “what has not been assumed has not been redeemed”; and what he meant was: humans could only be fully redeemed if God had taken our full human nature onto himself in Jesus Christ. 

Another theologian said:  “He became like us, so that we might become like him.”  And what he meant was that because Jesus was fully God and fully human, human beings can now share fully in his life with the Father.


In the Gospel of John, it says it like this: “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

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