Читать книгу Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season - Harmon Hartzell Bro - Страница 14

Still, Cayce’s capacity seemed so outrageous, so utterly unlikely, that I might have dismissed it as impossible, but for firsthand reports from those who had sought his strange counsel, called “readings.” Among these were friends of my family, such as the levelheaded Myrtle Walgreen, who years before her present wealth and community leadership had baked the first pies and cooked the first soups in what was now an extensive drugstore chain. She sought Cayce out. Another was Lowell Hoit, the widely read and distinguished head of Chicago’s Board of Trade. A third was Sherwood Eddy, the author and respected leader of the worldwide YMCA, who had not only secured Cayce’s counsel, but gone to see him in action. Then there was my mother.

As a longtime contributor to the Christian Century, a liberal Protestant journal (some of whose editors were leading members of our innovative home church adjoining the university), she had been sent a copy of Cayce’s biography to review or discard. Perhaps her skillful handling of religious controversies in the past, which had won her coverage in Time, prompted an editor to think she could make a sensible evaluation of the hardly believable Cayce story. As someone who had written nearly a dozen books of her own on religious subjects, and been the editor of the Congregational periodical, Social Action, she was a demanding reviewer.

In Cayce’s life she found threads of her own, as she traced his growing up in Kentucky, also once her home, and his vigorous lay leadership in the mainline Protestant group called the Christian Church or Disciples of Christ, which had been her family’s heritage since shortly after its beginnings in 1820. Further, she thought she saw in Cayce some of the disciplined idealism of her generation which had led her and my father (now president of Frances Shimer College in western Illinois) to spend a number of years as educational missionaries in China, my birthplace. And while she had no special interest or knowledge in the psychic field, she was deeply drawn to prayer and had published a widely used book of devotions, Every Day a Prayer,⁸ as well as learned how to meditate from Gerald Heard, the pioneering British anthropologist and philosopher.⁹ She concluded she had useful perspectives with which to assess Cayce. So on a lecture trip to New York she took a side journey by overnight train to Virginia, where she could meet Cayce, watch him work, and test him thoroughly with a trance evaluation of her health. Having recently been through a complete workup at the noted medical center in Battle Creek, Michigan, she had sufficient records of medical laboratory work, together with reports by specialized physicians, to measure Cayce’s performance with care. Since she was not in any critical medical need, she could simply ask Cayce for help but not demand a remarkable cure.

Her account to me of Cayce’s work, like her review in the Christian Century entitled “Explain It As You Will,” was careful but clearly favorable.¹⁰ Cayce was apparently neither a fraud nor self-deluded. He scored bull’s-eyes again and again on confirmable targets in her Battle Creek reports. He then suggested some cogent directions for treatments which her physicians had overlooked and subsequently found useful. Cayce was open and straightforward about his unritualized trance process. To her he seemed modest, with a sense of humor that kept his peculiar talent in perspective. He was committed to research on his work, about which he assured her he remained convinced that “I don’t do anything you can’t do, if you are willing to pay the price.” And he had in fact amassed much helpful data about the ability, built on thousands of case files, for study by any interested specialists. He appeared to have a good, critical mind. His wife and the people drawn around his consulting work seemed genuine and unpretentious. They had the refined Southern dignity and graciousness which my mother knew well from that part of her life when her father had been president of Transylvania University in Kentucky.