Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season. Harmon Hartzell Bro

beckoned to me as a part of ministry (though outrageous to my activist friends in the labor movement), and insisted I must, as he put it, “go the whole way!” in a vocation of psychological and theological scholarship and practice. The prospect was not appealing, because the small churches I had served as pastor often seemed stifling and I did not want to spend a lifetime as a scholar debunking Western and Eastern religious traditions. It seemed more than a little likely that Cayce had been influenced by his own church ties to push me in inappropriate directions. He included in the reading a lengthy and earnest discourse on theological issues, which seemed far too conservative and Christocentric for a Chicago theological student.

      If I ever went to work with him, it seemed I should help him disabuse himself of the reincarnation material, so he could get back to good, solid medical service. Since he came from the same church background as that in which I was ordained, he might listen to me. Of course, it would be difficult for him to face up to a major and long-standing error in his work, because it would throw a shadow over other unknowns that emerged in his trances, such as making considerable use of osteopathy and linking many disease processes to poor attitudes and emotions. But he deserved my help, if he proved as sincere and modest as he was reported. Until then I could lay him aside.

      Several developments changed my mind.

      The first was studying a little twenty-page autobiographical booklet sent with the life reading. Not slick but straightforward, it was called Edgar Cayce, His Life and Work. At first I had only glanced through it, but now I looked at it carefully and liked its modest spirit, where in some passages he was rueful about mistakes he had made in handling his ability:

       Man’s pageant must pass and fade, but God works in slower and more secret ways, His wondrous works to perform. He blows no trumpet, He rings no bell. He begins from within, seeking His ends by quiet growth. There is a strange power that men call weakness, a wisdom mistaken for folly. Man has one answer to every problem—power; but that is not God’s way. Then why shouldn’t I dread publicity?

      You ask, I am sure, “Have there been failures?” If there were not failures, friends, I would be afraid there was something super-natural about me. I am only human. Humanity is doomed to failure when it trusts in its own weak self, and most of us have that failing.¹¹

      At the end of the essay he suggested how people should evaluate his work for themselves before seeking his aid. Such issues of critical method were crucial for me, because they were at the heart of my graduate studies.

      First, he said, those asking his assistance should become well informed on it, by studying readings and consulting others who asked his help. Evidently he was not cultivating the gullible, for he added, “Do not seek a reading to satisfy some emotional whim or idle curiosity.” Second, he offered a pragmatic criterion as American as William James, and in line with his own Disciple church life: “Does the application of the information make individuals better husbands, wives, sons, daughters, citizens, friends?” This approach by itself could be merely moralistic, unless the concept of “better” were an ample one. But Cayce went right on to a third dimension, which gave the term size by firmly grounding it in the Bible and church history, as well as in reflective theology: “Do the principles expressed in the readings bear the stamp of divine approval in the light of His standards?”

      Then he offered an existential criterion by inviting people to stick with the reading they got long enough to see how it reflected their real purposes: “That which an individual seeks, that he will find. Those that seek only that which is of the earth-earthy may only find such; they that seek to bring a whole, well-rounded life, may find it.” Without the wrappings of biblical language, Cayce was recommending an empirical, rational approach to evaluating his work, balanced by the use of religious tradition in a self-critical, active spirit. A Chicago student could work within such a framework, because it allowed putting any one apparent finding of his up for grabs, including reincarnation and the high view of Christ seen in my reading.

      He offered one more criterion. Familiar to those of deep faith in traditions of both East and West, though not stressed in Chicago theological studies, it was the test of the Spirit, to be joined to the others: “To be of real value, the information must strike a vibrant chord with your inner being, ringing true with your spiritual desire.” This further test, added to the others, tipped the balance until our Cayce year could not be put off longer.

      One feature of his work that rang true as he suggested appeared in a booklet I had ordered from the small nonprofit organization that sponsored Cayce’s work, bearing the oddly nineteenth-century name of the Association for Research and Enlightenment. It was composed of excerpts from readings given in recent years on public affairs. Entitled Am I My Brother’s Keeper?,¹² it set forth in selection after selection an uncompromising insistence on social justice, including the rights of workers, the dignity of minorities, the claims of the poor, and the imperative of peace. One shocking passage even affirmed that the hope of the world would one day come out of Russia as social responsibility in everyday life. For my generation the task of separating the good from the bad in Marx and other utopians, while joining it to prophetic faith, had been central business, seen in Reinhold Niebuhr just as truly as in the picket lines where I had marched and been briefly jailed.¹³ When Cayce warned that America had to build social and racial justice or experience rioting in the streets and terrible hardship, with world leadership passing to the Orient, I knew that I had to take him seriously. He spoke to my deepest sense of the spirit of the prophets of Israel.

      The other source of inner prompting to seek out Cayce was the choral music I conducted in my new college post. Music had always been my carrier of transcendence, as Cayce had correctly noted in his trance counsel for me. Theology was not. My sermons did not proclaim that God was dead, but an objective listener might conclude that He was misunderstood or overrated, compared with our own responsibility to take hold of our lives and our troubled world. Prayer meant little to me, except as a poetic exercise in worship. But serious music picked up the sense of a nameless Beyond. I could keep busy in causes. I could lose myself in the puzzles of scholarship. But music, especially sacred choral music, spoke of an Other before which I too often felt a stranger.

      As June and I talked about the puzzling Cayce trance, we suspected there were clues from heightened creativity in music to help us guess what he might be doing. Both of us knew from long experience that highly disciplined singers, holding a sustained chord in a Latin motet or reaching for a racy Bach figure, could sometimes transcend their usual skills. They could reach notes higher or lower than when they were practicing alone, and in moments of ecstatic absorption together they could phrase with unexpected genius, finding their way into experiences they had never encountered—death on a cross, the love of a mother for a holy child, flesh transformed and healed by spirit. They could even touch into far centuries of plainsong, or distant worlds of Russian or Spanish anthems as though they belonged there. Such singing, we thought, might enter a state similar in principle to Cayce’s trance and only a breath apart from his attainment of distant or hidden knowledge.

      So (after some further exchanges with Cayce) I left my courses at the university unfinished, as June did hers at the downtown graduate music school. My college classes went into the hands of a substitute, and another minister took the weekend church. We piled our belongings into boxes and barrels to move to Virginia Beach for the rest of the school year, answering Cayce’s invitation to help him and to explore for ourselves his striking claim, “I don’t do anything you can’t do.”

      Most difficult to leave was the Navy choir that I had rehearsed and conducted daily at the college all through the summer and into the fall. The singers were students in a V12 program for technical specialists, who had grown skilled at their choral art, performing entire programs from memory. When I took them on short concert trips and sent them tramping down the aisles of auditoriums in their gleaming whites, voices ringing in male harmony, they seemed to stand for all the heroism required of young men in wartime. Audiences caught up in the spell of their marching songs or tunes from musical plays could move easily with them into the hushed or elevated spell of a spiritual or a chorale or a motet.

      Some of the strongest music we sang came from the mystical tradition of Russian Orthodoxy.