larger university and church worlds, to expose any messianism I found. And of course, if he turned out to be greedy or flawed in character, commercializing his ability, I would have to expose that, too.
Yet deeper than these concerns, which had to irritate him if he read my mind, was another layer in my thoughts: fears about my own adequacy. Would he pick up trends in my personality which I either did not recognize or preferred not to think about? He might see in my so-called aura a band of red for a strong temper. Or perhaps there were flashes of color for sexuality, not exactly erased by my recent marriage to a curvaceous blonde of Norwegian descent, whom I had courted with fervor for several years. He might even conclude that my activist resistance to arbitrary authority was colored by personal rebelliousness. Worse, he might find that my attempts to be objective about his capacities were partly intellectual arrogance, meant to balance off great uncertainty about my own spiritual maturity. I had not done much business with God outside of moments in choral music or in nature, though I had preached about him at some length. Cayce might find me tone-deaf to the inner notes of his work.
As we talked on, I felt a bit less vulnerable. It occurred to me that Cayce’s reported intuition should often have shown him in others the kind of momentary hesitation and fear which shadowed my thoughts (as I later found they had June’s). He must by now know well that people with varying needs to prove themselves would approach him with masked doubts and even strategies to unveil his delusions or flaws. Part of his strange vocation would be having to live with currents of unpleasant suspicion. He would also have learned to reassure others who approached him that he would not suddenly expose whatever he saw in them that was unworthy. His calling, if authentic, was not enviable. He had to be lonely at some level. Perhaps those who got to know him dropped not only their doubts, but their secret ambitions to use him. If they did not, or could not, then here was a man who could safely wrap around himself only his household. That limitation would be costly to his sense of identity and worth, already upended by the peculiarity of his gift.
The sense of his being stranded without peers or deep support outside the family would return often in the months ahead, when he seemed increasingly someone whose ability might have been welcomed in another time or culture, but a figure out of season in modern America. The implications were serious. If others who sought to duplicate his skills had also to stand awkwardly alone, even among well-meaning friends, who would try? What sort of person could meet the test of unending estrangement, created not only by doubt of unfamiliar capacities, but also by sudden fear of his or her penetrating accuracy?
His Sense of Global Violence
We made small talk about our trip on a train so crowded that soldiers and sailors stood in the aisles. Cayce spoke with such easy knowledge about Chicago and other cities on our route, as well as about porters and dining cars and berths, that it was soon clear he was a sophisticated traveler. Later I would learn, in part by journeying with him, how much he liked to take trips and how (as his family put it) he could pack a bag in five minutes. I would discover that he had been to most of the major urban centers of the country, often many times, as he responded to emergency pleas for aid and searched for how best to serve with his unusual gift. At the moment I could only note how the image of a well-traveled American collided with stereotypes of a helpless, unworldly ascetic which his Catholic biographer had faintly suggested in portraying him as the victim of a remarkable endowment.
Soon we turned our exchanges to the war, commenting on the strangeness of the total blackout. Cayce spoke with quiet pride of his two sons in military service, Hugh Lynn and Edgar Evans, one overseas and the other headed there. Yet as he described their assignments, his face showed for a moment the sharp-edged loss he felt from their absence. It seemed likely that family ties might be more important to him than Southern mores already made them. Being a man with a dubious calling would enhance his dependence on them and make their distance under peril a persistent wound.
The gravity of the war engaged him deeply as he continued to speak. He told of the servicemen who wrote him often from their overseas posts, telling their anxiety about the meaning and destiny of their lives and their nation. A few even asked how to face their own threatened dying, since they knew him well enough to credit his unusual abilities, including seeing past death. What would happen to them, they wanted to know, in the first hours after being killed, and how should they prepare?
Most were young men from the Sunday school classes he had taught for over fifty years or the sons of those in his classes from churches at Virginia Beach, at Selma, Alabama, or in Kentucky. He tried when he answered each letter, he said, to create a helpful perspective. And he prayed for those to whom he wrote. To him humankind was going through a terrible trial and refinement by fire, having to learn to rely more on spiritual reality and on brother-sisterhood before God. Each individual caught in the conflict had to search for the same final realities. His observations did not sound like ritual sentiments from a Bible teacher, for he spoke haltingly, as though searching for images for the unthinkable destruction which crowded us all.
How deeply he felt a part of the times and responsible to affect its outcomes, rather than being a mental wonder-worker on the sidelines, became even clearer when Gladys referred briefly to a vision which had come to Cayce in 1936, telling him of the coming world conflict. Cayce had been working in his garden, where he loved to spend his hours out of his office, when he looked up to see a searing panorama of blood-red chariots riding across the sky above the ocean. Beside him there suddenly stood a man in tunic, helmet, armor, and leg guards of ancient times, saying, “The chariots of the Lord, and the horsemen thereof,” before he abruptly disappeared. To Cayce the vision meant the coming of death and destruction on a tremendous scale, and he dropped his hoe and ran into the house. He shook so badly that his elder son thought he was having a heart attack. And Cayce was so affected by the tragedy he had seen that he was unable to speak of it for several days. Such an experience might be psychic. But it was a long way from giving mediumistic messages from the dead in a darkened room. It spoke of Cayce’s profound concern for his fellows in an ominous and bloody age.
He Sent Himself to Unknown Territories
The phone rang several times, and Gladys reported calls from people seeking urgent medical aid. She had just been told, she added, that the phone company was limiting their incoming long-distance calls, because so many were being placed to Cayce that others in Virginia Beach could not get lines to call out, and wartime restrictions made extra lines impossible. How, we asked, did local people see Cayce, now that his recently published biography had made him a public figure? For example, how did the priest across the way at the little Catholic church view Cayce’s efforts? Cayce grinned and suggested that we look tomorrow at the large twin candles in holders, each over three feet tall, which were placed to keep unlit vigil on either side of the outer door to his office. The priest had quietly brought them some time ago as a blessing and a protection. He had not stayed long, but his encouragement seemed heartfelt.
When we spoke of the Presbyterian Church, where Cayce had his membership (since there was no Disciple or Christian Church in the community), we turned to his Sunday morning adult Bible class there, and drew Cayce out on the passages he was currently teaching. My worst fear was that he might be a proof-texting pietist, citing Bible verses as inerrantly inspired and capable of predicting current events, as well as dictating arbitrary rules of behavior. After all, here was the first man I had met who had memorized most of the Bible.
But my fear was ungrounded. When Cayce likened the uprooting of millions in Europe and Asia to Israel’s painful exile in its time of humbling and cleansing, and when he spoke of the worldwide hunger for leadership by referring to Moses leading a wayward people through the Exodus wilderness, I could see that he looked to the full scope and weight of the biblical drama. Sin and grace met in his comments. He offered neither shallow optimism nor Calvinist gloom but a steady realism about the human heart and will. He could evoke with a photographer’s acute perception
