SHEKINAH
“And she was dialogueing with all of these theologians who were trying to explain why God allowed Auschwitz to happen, that God could have done something but God choose not to because God had bigger designs that we just had to understand and when God wants to, God can kind of intervene in history and change things, but since God isn’t, there is some greater plan that we have to learn how to trust. And Melissa Rapheal said, that God understanding resembles Hitler alot more than it resembles any benevolent reality in our world”.
Azusa Street is a tiny side street, more like an alley, in the southern section of Little Tokyo. Go one block south and you’re in Skid Row. In 1998, Time-Life published The Life Millenium: the one hundred most important events and people over one thousand years 1000–2000AD. The Azusa Street Revival of 1906 is listed as number sixty-eight.
From an address titled Flourishing in the Midst of Trauma by Dr. Frank Rodgers, co-director of the Center for Engaged Compassion. “The real God is a God of infinite compassion that is a spiritual resource for us in trauma in ways that are profoundly reparative and restoring. For me, my insight into this is from a Holocaust theologian, Melissa Raphael, who wrote a book called The Feminine Face of God in Auschwitz. And she was dialogueing with all of these theologians who were trying to explain why God allowed Auschwitz to happen, that could have done something but God choose not to because God had bigger designs that we just had to understand and when God wants to, God can kind of intervene in history and change things, but since God isn’t, there is some greater plan that we have to learn how to trust. And Melissa Rapheal said, that God understanding resembles Hitler alot more than it resembles any benevolent reality in our world. That god needs to die in our religious imagination. But she said there is another sacred essence that was in Auschwitz. It’s the feminine face of God and for her Jewish tradition she calls it Shekinah. Shekinah is that divine reality that goes with God’s people into exile. That enters into suffering with them, who is a companion, who could sit with us in our despair, who can be a presence that gets us, that understands, that doesn’t have the power to stop bad things from happening, but does have the presence of compassion, that can be a companion that keeps our own spirit alive. It can resuscitate that pilot light within us. And the miracle of Auschwitz is that feminine divine presence was being embodied in the women. The women in those circumstances should have had their spirits squashed and completely destroyed, instead found it within them to wash each other’s faces, to massage each other’s hands, to pick lice from each other’s hair, to hold crying babies, to tend to those who were dying, even to adorn themselves in daily rituals of hygiene claiming their own dignity, their own beauty in the midst of forces that was trying to dehumanize them. That is a power that can restore the human spirit. That is a power that companions us in the midst of trauma.”
The word “shekinah” means to dwell.
The Azusa Street Revival of 1908 was led by Rev. William Seymour, a Black preacher in a time when it was illegal for a Black man to be on the streets at night in some parts of Los Angeles.
The book “They Told Me Their Stories: the youth and children of Azusa Street tell their stories” is a series of interviews of the “Senior Saints” — in their 70’s telling their stories as teen-agers participating in the Azusa Street Revival. The Revival began in 1906 and began to collapse a few years later mainly due to racism. One of the Senior Saints said as the Revival began to collapse, Rev. Seymour said in around one hundred years there would be an even greater and more far reaching outpouring of the Holy Spirit and Shekinah Glory than was experienced at Azusa.
Shekinah Glory was understood as a mist, like a cloud, that would appear at times during their gatherings at Azusa Street. When the cloud appeared, that is when the greatest miraculous healings took place.
Azusa is a Tongva word translated as Healing and Blessed Miracle. It was a nickname given to Coma Lee, a Tongva teen-ager in the late 1700’s known for having a gift of Divine Healing. She lived in what was later named the City of Azusa.