On the Spirituality of Lightheartedness

by Helen Steere Horn, Anne Steere Nash

Overview

Helen Horn lays out a view of how to balance the internal refreshment of a light heart with the work needed to address suffering, hunger, and injustice in the world. She offers an invitation into living the paradox, describing her personal journey of learning how to bring practices of lightheartedness to her work, activism, and life. Calling on the Bible, poetry and creativity, her deep love of music, her Quaker community, her family, and her experience with cancer, she shares stories of brokenness and hope. The text has been adapted from the manuscript of a speech written in the 1990s. With an introduction by Rebecca Kratz Mays. Discussion questions included.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940162653974
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	01/11/2020
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #456
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	152 KB

About the Author

Helen Steere Horn was a member of the Pendle Hill community from her childhood when her father, Douglas Steere, directed the summer school and her mother, Dorothy Steere, was Head Resident. After working in Europe, Africa, and three American cities, she settled with her naturalist/political reformer husband, David, in a secluded old house on Bird in Hand Farm in Appalachian Ohio, which has since become the Woodcock Nature Preserve.

Helen was a lifelong member of the Religious Society of Friends and a founding member of the Athens (Ohio) Friends Meeting. She was a teacher in high schools, a counselor in a community mental health facility, and an ardent peace activist. She published poems in Friends Journal and Friendly Woman and wrote Pendle Hill Pamphlet #329, There Is a Fountain: A Quaker Life in Process in 1996.

Helen’s younger sister, Anne Steere Nash, who assisted in the preparation of the pamphlet, remembers that this was originally written as a speech for a Quaker gathering in the 1990s. It reflects Helen’s ability to play while still feeling deeply the suffering of the world beyond her tranquil hill farm. She left this world at the end of April 2018 when she was killed instantly in an automobile accident in Athens, Ohio.