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

The Sum of a Life's Work: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (Part II)

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Approximately a year and a half ago, my wife and I started a little film-watching project, working our way through every single feature-length movie Tom Hanks has made in his 40 + years of acting. The fact that this project took us over a year and a half to complete, watching movies at the respectable rate of roughly one a week, illustrates on its own how extensive and prolific his career has been. Over the course of approximately 64 films, we saw comedies, dramas, biopics, adventure films and 3-D animated cartoons. Along the way we saw at least one film in pretty much every definable genre, from westerns (News of the World) to science fiction (Finch), from gangster films (Road to Perdition), to legal dramas (Philadelphia), to war movies (Saving Private Ryan) and more.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am planning, over the next few months, to offer some spiritual reflections on the full filmography of Tom Hanks, as viewed through the lens of a Christian theology. And one of the first things that stands out when you start to think theologically about the movies of Tom Hanks is just how big and diverse a body of work they comprise. He is widely recognized as one of Hollywood’s most prolific actors, and the recognition is well-earned.

It’s not just the quantity of films, either, but also the wide range of quality. In the last year and a half, my wife and I saw some of the most poignant performances captured on film, and also some of the worst. That two of my favorite films of all time (Forrest Gump, Joe vs. the Volcano), and two of the awfullest movies I’ve ever seen (The Da Vinci Code, Volunteers) all starred the same actor says a lot about the range of this particular actor’s career. My strong impression is that, after he reached the point where in his fame where he could easily weather a flop, he started choosing his scripts based on his own personal interest in the story or the character, whether or not the project had all the ingredients of a hit. This has led to some fascinating gems that might otherwise not have been made, but also some nearly unwatchable movies.

As a small life lesson, the full Tom Hanks filmography illustrates how the whole of a person’s life is always greater than the sum of its individual parts. If the value of Tom Hanks’s career were calculated as a simple equation of “hits” minus “bombs,” it’s quite possible he might only break even (I’ve not done the math, but my strong hunch is that there is an equal representation of both on the list of his acting credits). Yet, when viewed as a whole, there is something about the full body of the man’s life work that transcends each individual success or failure.

Because his life’s work has been so well-captured on film, of course, it’s easier to notice this “something bigger” that emerges from the whole, but once you’ve seen, it encourages you to consider your own life’s work in a similar light. It can be tempting to dwell on either the successes and failures of life as though each one defines us or determines our worth on its own. One of the things you realize when you watch the full career of a prolific actor like Tom Hanks, however, is that the meaning of a life never really boils down to a single achievement or failure. The meaning of our lives, rather, emerges out of the entirety of our efforts—the good and the bad—and as such it transcends every individual homerun or strikeout.

On its own this observation is wise, maybe, but not profoundly spiritual, or explicitly Christian. It becomes so, however, when you connect it to Christian concepts like grace and discipleship, holiness and forgiveness. Because the Christian life places such a strong emphasis on living in obedience to the teachings of Jesus (Matt 28:20), working out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12), and having a righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees (Matt 5:20), it can be tempting to assume that our lives as disciples of Jesus can be evaluated in simple terms of our moral successes weighed against our moral failings. It’s equally easy to suppose that those individual “works”—for the good or the bad—in some way define us as either a success or a failure, spiritually speaking.

But if the life’s work of an actor with the scope and range of a Tom Hanks is greater than the sum of its individual films, this is infinitely truer for the life’s work of a sincere follower of Jesus Christ, someone seeking authentically to live their lives in his footsteps. When viewed though the lens of God’s grace, the meaning and the value of our lives as disciples emerges as a whole that beautifully transcends the individual steps forward or backward we may make in seeking to follow Him. And only God himself knows what will be revealed in the end, when the full filmography of our lives is viewed in its entirety, and we stand before him to receive our reward.

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