December 2020, a prayer a plea a bird responds to climate and pandemic with prayers and stories that lament what is lost, celebrate what is and ask for courage to call forth what is needed.
As with my first book Tender, it is published by MediaCom and can be purchased from them directly.
from the Preface
A prayer, a plea, a bird does not shy away from lament and contrition, neither does it shrink from joy. At first glance the reader will notice the changing ways words appear on the page – from brief prayer forms that carry the urgency of climate, pandemic and racism – to longer prayers, vignettes and non-fiction stories.
The writer seeks to make a space – for people of faith who doubt, for people of no faith or of abandoned allegiances. The prayers sit alongside short narrative reflections. These pungent glimpses of neighbourhood life are plucked from Perrin’s writing over some decades. They reflect her own pathway as a young parent, storyteller, neighbour and teacher. She also bears witness to the lives of others as a school chaplain, pastoral carer and lover of the natural world. Grief, absence and erasure are named and acknowledged, sometimes exposing habits of not-seeing.
Julie Perrin adopts an ancient Christian prayer form, the collect, that gathers up the needs of the day and addresses them to a particular characteristic of God. The form invites fresh ways of naming the Divine, such as ‘Breath giver’, ‘Holy One’, ‘Broken God’, ‘Colour maker’ and ‘God of astonishments’…
Here are the opening collects from the section 'Collects for the earth' Breath giver, who whispered all that is into being, arrest our project of extinction, because extinguished now is the breath of all your creatures. Breathe love into us again for this world we’ve almost lost, which you first made – love’s exhalation. Broken God, whose body is the world, undo the violence that dismembers all creation. Bind the wounds of places we’ve unmade – gouged earth, razed forests, toxic waters. Cry in us songs of resistance whose tears weep clean the sea.