Our tiny local meeting was reviewing a document forwarded us from our yearly meeting last week. The document was a set of statements of belief, intended to represent the shared beliefs of the yearly meeting, regarding careers and family and the like. A one-step-prior-to-Advices-and-Queries sort of document.

It was, overall, good practical stuff. We liked how it gave young Friends some sense of how to proceed when entering into careers, and Friends in general some direction when faced with moral choices in their careers. We liked the fact that it empowered those who work in humble jobs, while at the same time honoring the fact that one may serve God just as much in positions to which the world gives glory.

It reminded me of the sort of level-headed advice, regarding worldly affairs, that Friends were given to in the old days, and that I’ve always loved:

We caution Friends against hastily starting in business. Time spent in wise enquiry is well spent. This warning is especially to be borne in mind by those contemplating partnership. Let Friends, before entering into relationships involving such far-reaching consequences, not only assure themselves of the solvency and credit of the other parties, but also consider that the happiness and success of the intimate relation depend upon mutual confidence, unselfishness, and forbearance; and also upon the partners holding similar standards of business conduct.

We further caution our members against verbal understandings, whether in the formation of partnerships or in other business transactions. Serious trouble has often arisen from the absence of clear and well drawn agreements. Even in the case of near relatives or close friends, equal caution should be observed; for the closer the friendship the more serious is the injury caused by misunderstandings, such as are only too common when important matters are settled by verbal arrangement.

   — London Yearly Meeting Revision Committee [1911]; §425 in London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, Christian faith and practice in the experience of the Society of Friends [1959, 1966])

At the same time, though, there was something that was bothering me. I thought, a lot of this sounds just a little too much like the would-be-wise, but ultimately clueless Polonius giving advice to his son Laërtes — which made me uneasy:

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
…Do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledg’d comrade. …
Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
For a loan oft loses both itself and friend;
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.P>

   — Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene iii

Know your strongest quality. Know your preëminent gift — cultivate it and it will assist the rest. Everyone would have excelled in something if he had known his strong point. Notice in what quality you surpass and take charge of that. … Most do violence to their natural aptitude and thus attain superiority in nothing. Time enlightens us too late….

   — trans. by Joseph Jacobs (1892)

I mentioned Polonius to the group, and they responded, “But Polonius’s was good advice!” And they were quite right, at least as far as Polonius’s own kind of thinking went, so I knew I didn’t have my finger on what was bothering me quite yet.

At fifty-six, friends, I may see deeper into the affairs of humankind than in my twenties, but I’m also a good deal slower on the uptake. I chased about in my mind after what was bothering me for a good ten minutes, without any success at all, while the conversation ranged through other parts of the document we were critiquing. And then a young Friend sitting near me, who is of course quicker on the uptake than myself, helped me to see the problem: There was too little consciousness of the cross expressed in it.

The document was full of sound advice, very sound, but apart from a call at one point to simplicity and a recognition at another of the virtues of the humble life, it never strayed near the path of self-sacrifice.

The young Friend sitting near me has of course been wrestling with the call of the Cross in his own life, these past few years. So it was no wonder that the issue leaped out at him.

I know for a fact that the document’s authors are likewise aware of the path of the cross, and honor it in their own lives. It isn’t a matter of them being spiritual shallow or purblind; they’re not.

But recommending the path of the cross is often a lot harder when we are addressing others, and especially the young, and especially on behalf of an organization larger than ourselves, than it is when we are simply talking to ourselves. And I think that’s what was happening here.

Our little meeting wound up reporting to the authors of the document that we liked it very much, but that we felt it needed to be expanded, to speak of the value of the path of the Cross alongside — and without denigrating — the path of worldly careers and good sense. For there is great need of both the Cross and good sense in our world.

I came home, then, and the matter receded to the back of my mind — until today, when I was looking at a handful of documents on-line from a couple of our big Friends service organizations. And then it hit me a second time: there didn’t seem to be much of a sense of the importance of the path of the cross, being expressed in the stuff I was looking at. Plenty of sound worldly wisdom (which I think of as “Righteousness₁”), but not much in the way of calls to lay it all on the line and lose everything if necessary (“Righteousness₂”).

Friends, I’m not denigrating either type of righteousness. We need to have both — or we perish. But as the young Friend also said, it’s very hard to balance the one with the other.

Possibly what we really need is some sort of advice that will help us comprehend and grasp the relationship between these two sorts of righteousness.

And we also need a query: Friends, as you are finding your path through life, are you taking into account both the value of worldly practicality and the path of the Cross?