in biblical accounts. But he also saw the vista of an entire people trying to serve God and failing as often as they succeeded. Here was no arbitrary fundamentalist demanding conformity to doctrinal touchstones but a man for whom the Bible was home country, peopled with ambiguous relatives of his, reported in sagas both driven and noble. When he spoke of the responsibility on all of us to use our abilities to help others, while our destinies were being weighed and spirits stretched by war, it was clear that for him biblical faith was not a smug retreat from the world, but a prod to be found worthy of that part of events entrusted to each of us.
As Cayce spoke, something familiar about him beckoned to me.
It was his resemblance to missionaries from my boyhood in China, where my parents had been educators. Those I had known best were doers, not just evangelists; they were teachers, nurses, engineers, and physicians, determined to help train the native leadership among those they served rather than make themselves indispensable. Their faith had much practical worldliness, of the sort that Cayce evinced. I could recall my father bringing home to the kitchen baby girls he found abandoned on the walls of our Chinese city, where they had been left to die because girls were so little valued; patiently he and my mother had brought them back to life. And I could still see both my parents unbinding the feet of young Chinese women, knowing that their newfound freedom of healthy movement would be bought at the price of alienation in their villages. Such missionaries thought they could make a difference in some part of the globe or in some human need which others considered hopeless. Their combination of prayer and unflagging action made them remarkably vital. Cayce seemed to have some of their stubborn goodwill and confidence. No wonder he had made it his business to recruit couples to be medical missionaries in every church where he had taught, sending them off to underdeveloped countries in what would later be called the Third World. He sent himself in his odd trance into territories of the mind and heart just as little known but marked by similar human needs.
My mother’s relish came to mind, as she told how Cayce had arranged for her to speak to the missionary society in his Presbyterian church on the occasion of her first visit. Her letters had mentioned her overseas background, and he had acted promptly. When she arrived, he announced that she was scheduled to speak to the missionary group that morning, and her protests that she had come to witness readings were useless. Cayce was quite clear on his priorities: she could hear his readings anytime, but addressing the group on overseas missions was really important.
He warmed to our exchanges, which gradually became a series of his stories, told with quietly dramatic skill and charm. Indeed, one tale followed the other so easily that he paused only briefly to draw us out. It was a pattern which (I later learned) he used deliberately, to keep himself from picking up unwanted psychic information about those before him. Sharp concentration too easily led him to read people’s minds—and he thought these were none of his business. The problem was the same, I would discover, as that which blocked him from playing bridge, though he loved the game and was good at it. Players concentrated so hard that he could read their minds, and the fun went out of his play. Finally he had taken to inventing his own card games, one of which had been the noisy bidding contest of Pit or Corner the Market, which I had often played as a youngster, as had many in my generation.14
Our conversation turned naturally to Cayce’s biography. Reporting on the strangeness of reading it in the setting of a weapons project, I studied Cayce’s face for hints of self-importance. Evidently pleased with the book, he was not so fascinated to find himself in print that he could speak of nothing else. But now that he had considerable public respectability at last, it seemed reasonable for him to be tempted by grandiosity. We were catching him at the crest of his life. If success were as much a test of a person’s mettle as failure, then we were there at the right time to discover his essential character. He would be less than human if he were not tempted to use his new position to make up for past disappointments.
Prayers at the Ear of God
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
