Читать книгу Edgar Cayce A Seer Out of Season - Harmon Hartzell Bro - Страница 21

But Cayce turned aside the talk of his fame by remarking with a smile, “Your mother has just about ruined us.” He meant not only the effects of her favorable review in the Christian Century, limited to church readers, but the much larger impact of her later story about him in Coronet magazine¹⁵ which was a widely read newsstand periodical—a sort of Reader’s Digest with photos. The issue with her article had sold more copies than any other in the magazine’s history; the editors had told her they had been forced to commandeer a whole wing of their floor in a downtown Chicago skyscraper just to answer letters and phone calls about Cayce. But we were not prepared for what we saw next in Cayce’s home as a result of that article and the publication of his biography.

He took us all into the dining room, pleasantly conventional with its dark wood buffet and china closet framing the table and straight-backed chairs. There, stacked waist high along every empty wall space, were bundles of letters still in their envelopes, wrapped in rubber bands. And when we went through a small pantry-like room into the library which formed the center of three offices that made up the addition to his home, more letters in envelopes, opened and unopened, were stacked three feet high along the walls. Airmail and special delivery letters, and even telegrams, were stuck indiscriminately among the bundles, frustrating their senders’ hopes for urgent attention in a stupefying flood of mail. All of these piled-up communications represented thousands and thousands of persons. The packets seemed to stare reproachfully at us, and the effect was like the ringing of unanswered telephones, which violates the response patterns of a lifetime. June and I sat down in dismay.

Cayce explained that once before he had faced an outpouring of hundreds and even thousands of letters asking for help, when in 1910 The New York Times had run a piece about him after a report at a medical conference in Boston. But the inquiries then were as mild rain compared with this storm of response. We could see for ourselves the help he needed to take the place of his elder son, his chief helper before being drafted.

To start with, a great many of the letters contained money. There was cash in some, often a twenty-dollar bill but sometimes fifty or a hundred dollars or more. Others held checks, waiting uncashed while their senders tried to balance their accounts. There were money orders and telegraph drafts. Cayce was determined to send back all of the money, every cent. His policy was to offer his trance service only to those who understood exactly what they were getting. Each seeker had to be mailed a small booklet telling of Cayce’s life and work, and explaining the modest but real research and educational program of the organization which sponsored his readings. Only if they agreed to the ideals and purposes of the effort, and signed up as members, could they then request a reading—all for twenty dollars. He wanted people to pay only what was required, and even this amount he found difficult to charge. As recently as a couple of decades before, he had still depended on a free-will offering for his aid—just what he had grown up with in churches where he belonged.

This was my first look at the honesty and generosity in handling money which I would see in Cayce during all the months ahead. Much later I would learn by inspecting his records that he not only gave his readings free to physicians and ministers, but did not charge as many as a fifth of those who sought his aid. Nor did he ever harass a delinquent who had promised to pay later. Evidently he placed his trust in something besides cautious business practices.

Here also was evidence of his disinclination to promote himself or to capitalize on the distresses of others. When in the months that followed I dug through all his files and clippings and queried his associates, I was able to find only one week when he had advertised his services, twenty years earlier in Alabama. He trusted that those who needed his aid would find him, as they were certainly doing now.

It was clear we would have to hire and supervise a number of typists if we were to process all this mail, together with the hundreds of letters which could be expected to continue arriving each day. In addition, there were letters to send to the many who had already written a second time, joining the Association and asking for a reading. These people had to be reminded that Cayce was booked ahead for months, except for the most severe emergencies. They each needed a time given for their appointment, and instructions to keep the period in a meditative state of asking for help from the divine. Not a few of them also needed encouragement just to go on coping with their personal traumas. Evidently Cayce would like to find a plan to allow him to write personally to each inquirer, feeling a responsibility to all those who reached out to him across the bounds of normal reality. But his was a hopeless hope. Even with a full platoon of stenographers taking down his words, he could never answer so many letters individually. Yet one could sympathize with his desire.

For these were not fan mail. They were not, except in a few instances, notes from curiosity seekers. The bulk were accounts of genuine and sometimes desperate need. Each told of pain at the center of a life, whether of the writer or someone close, often a child or relative. Not a few of the envelopes were from overseas, including some in foreign languages but most on the thin, blue, folded V-Mail from military bases. One handwritten note I picked from the top of a pile began, “Mr. Cayce, I am dying.”

Perhaps if one stood at the ear of God and heard the anguished prayers of a given night, one would discover just the kinds of cries that were scrawled and typed on these thousands of letters and wires. Cayce grew quiet as the rest of us pulled out letters at random and read portions of them aloud. It was clear that he knew where the responsibility fell for acting on all this need. When he spoke tersely, it was with strong, compressed feeling and addressed only one question: pain. His deepest promise, which he saw as the ground of his ability, had been to lift pain from sufferers. Here was pain beyond measure. How was he to keep his word?

I made notes, as I had been doing all evening. One letter was from a mother whose son was in prison, falsely accused, she said. Another was written in failing handwriting from someone with advanced multiple sclerosis, given no hope for recovery but only the prospect of slowly disintegrating as a human being. A teenager wrote that she was pregnant and asked what to tell her parents and whether to confront the young man soon to be a father. A man wrote about his wife’s convulsions, slowly taking her away from him and their four children. An older person wrote that he was dying of cancer, asking how to make his remaining life count most, if Cayce were unable to prolong it. A mother enclosed a photograph of her son missing in action in the South Pacific, begging Cayce to locate him. A youngster, not knowing the modes of Cayce’s aid, explained that her Scottie dog, the love of her life, was lost and that she needed Cayce’s unusual help to find him. A woman wrote of her sister in a mental institution and hoped Cayce might find a cure to get her out and returned to her family. A retired mechanic scrawled in a shaky hand his greetings whose cordiality overleaped spelling, “Best whiches,” as he asked for aid with his arthritis.

We had begun reading aloud from the letters in good spirits, to get a feel for their content. But as we read further, our voices began to trail off. It was too much. Who could bear all of this suffering?

To be sure, a few of the letters we read that first night made us chuckle. Someone wanted to know what to do for toes that “curl up when they are cold.” A woman wanted advice on what color to dye her hair to go best with her eyes. Several sought guidance on choosing between lovers or possible mates, ready to consult Cayce without hesitation on such weighty decisions. But even the small requests, which brought relief by contrast with the heroic needs, were obviously important to the petitioners: bunions, bad breath, snoring, big feet, small breasts, and an unbearable employer. Surprisingly few people asked to be told of their past lives.

Many who wrote referred to Cayce’s ability as a gift from God.

Some appeared merely pious, voicing stereotypes. But others did not. They seemed to be saying, “The universe ought to produce just what you are doing. As soon as I read your story, I knew it was right.” I made a note to explore what made people assign different types of meaning to Cayce’s gift (and later wrote my doctoral dissertation on this same theme).¹⁶ Even if Cayce’s counsel proved sometimes flawed, he had an unusual opportunity to help those who so clearly opened their hearts to him, pouring out in letters their renewed sense of the goodness and closeness of the divine.