Along with spandex shorts, Pokémon, SUVs, and those black leather Doc Marten boots, the 1990s gave the masses a simple bracelet with four letters: WWJD. For people of Christian faith, this popular motto meant, "What Would Jesus Do?"
If you encounter some persistent temptation, those four letters are a reminder to help you make the right decision.
I was sitting with a large group of faith leaders in Los Angeles this past week, when I thought of what these four letters brought to our popular culture two decades ago. I realized that WWJD could also be a spiritual reminder when you step over a sleeping homeless man sprawled across the sidewalk or when a tin can is shoved into your personal space by a woman in desperate need of change.
The group consisted of leaders from the Jewish and Islamic traditions as well as the Christian faith, but the idea WWJD can apply to any of these. WWJD: what would Jesus do, or what would Jehovah do? WWAD: what would Allah do? WWBD: what would Buddha do? Bestow an act of compassion on hurting people or ignore these homeless people by concluding they just need to get a job?
Mobilizing the Faith Community
The nearly three dozen faith leaders met to bring together their moral voices in order to tell society, "enough is enough!" Their purpose for gathering was to tell our society that the scourge of homelessness ravaging our population needs to end.
For decades the faith community has helped build an amazing network of compassionate institutions, from homeless shelters and soup kitchens to food pantries and transitional housing. They have transformed the lives of thousands of people.
But despite their efforts, homelessness has increased dramatically, to a point that political and community leaders are yearning for new ways to approach homelessness.
A leader who represented hundreds of Islamic congregations in Southern California shared with the group, "After years of performing acts of 'Rahman' (for example, compassionate programs that feed homeless people) my young people keep telling me that we need to do more than just fill their stomachs. We need to house them."
Heads nodded. Handing out a sack lunch or a bag of groceries is strategic compassion to fill a person's stomach today. But if they continue to return for months, or even years, that "Mitzvah," the Jewish term for "good deed," becomes less and less compassionate.
From Compassion to Justice
Those in the Jewish tradition also embrace "Tzedakah," best defined as an "act of justice." Where a Mitzvah is passing out clean socks to homeless people, an act of Tzedakah would help that person access permanent housing or help change a society that allows homelessness in the first place.
Justice should become the true mantra for ending homelessness in this country. Across our nation, we spend billions of dollars performing compassionate acts. It is really time for the faith community to use its moral voice, its faith traditions and to begin to transform our society's approach from Mitzvah to Tzedakah, from compassion to justice.
What would Jesus do about today's homelessness? He would start with a sack lunch and a prayer. And then would begin to overturn society's approach to homelessness.
Perhaps in the decade of 2010, a new sort of bracelet will become the fad: WWID. What Would I Do (to end homelessness).
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Sure, he would have worked to get the nation to do something about the problems although he said "the poor we have with us always." Like me in many of my political posts, I often show how the Preamble to the Constitution say "We The People" are working to form "a more perfect union" and "establish justice for ourselves" but the government ignores that requirement. Most people don't realize everything after the preamble is to create the conditions to provide those thing written in the Preamble "for the United States of America."
WWJD? Everything he could to ensure the laws are "faithfully executed" per Article 2:3, that the government is about providing the needs of the governed per Declaration of Independence. That's WJWD.
first sympathy is not compassion.
second empathy is not compassion.
please study deeply the difference between compassion, empathy, and sympathy.
we are not a compassionate nation.
any nation that has a love affair with capitalism are not compassionate people.
a profits over people ideology is not a compassionate society.
we barely rate on the sympathy scale.
oh a church will have a bake sale raise 400 dollars for one of their follower's 95,000 dollar medical bill then drive home and think of themselves as compassionate, then the next week vote down universal health care.
we are a selfish, greedy and imperialistic society due to decades of conditioning by capitalism.
but you know this as you know we must change our society not just give more handouts.
often those that give reveals more about their guilt and ego than their level of even sympathy.
again you lack understanding of the world compassion. compassion is understanding. if we as a nation had compassion there would be no homeless or wars for corp profits. period.
here is a link of your compassionate americans and what their love of wars has caused in the world.
http://pubrecord.org/world/5811/depleted-uranium-babies-afghanistan/
read and weep. this is what a capitalist society has to offer to the world.