and theologians who had given their lives to studying the human condition but had not seen reincarnation as part of it? What of Augustine and Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, Spinoza and Kant, not to mention Darwin, Marx, and Freud? To question all these minds was like blowing up our campus. Only a fanatical empiricist, it seemed, would start fresh in such an investigation when there was so much else important to study in a world at war. If Cayce were right, then large portions of the Orient had been correct all along in their Hindu and Buddhist perspectives. Who knows where this might lead? Were we not at war with the Buddhist country of Japan? Shouldn’t that reveal something about their understanding of ultimate reality? (That we were also at war with Germany, the cradle of modern philosophy and theology, and the source of much of the greatest in Western music and poetry, did not come up as readily.) Surely if Cayce’s work were tragically flawed on reincarnation, it must be flawed in other areas. No wonder it had not been more studied.
How Cayce Asked to Be Evaluated
So I put off the idea of working with Cayce, throwing myself into courses and my new marriage. A faculty appointment came through for me at George Williams College, only blocks from the university. Preparing my teaching while I kept up my graduate studies was demanding, and I was grateful to be able to give up the night work in the Manhattan Project. On weekends I preached at a little Disciple church on Chicago’s far South Side. We moved into a row house and delighted in fixing it up, as young couples will. My wife, June, was a concert pianist, a pupil of Percy Granger, who had already started performing with orchestras. Now a graduate student at Chicago Musical College, studying with Chicago’s most respected pianist, Rudolph Ganz, she had a bright future in music. This was no time to move to an isolated summer resort in Virginia.
But now and again I pulled out the transcript of a counseling discourse that I had requested of Cayce and studied it to the accompaniment of June’s sweeping passages from Liszt, Chopin, and Bach. There Cayce undertook to spell out my life purpose and talents in what he called a “life reading” that included several supposed past existences. What was in it to suggest that I should look further into his work?
The material was not exactly promising. He assigned me no prominent stature—which I noted with relief, since he had already given my parents roles within the circles around Jesus in a comparable reading for my mother. If he were passing out ego trips, he could forget my help. As seen in his trance vision, the past lives which most shaped my present existence were those as a sculptor of religious images in prehistoric times, a priest occupied with music and dance in an Egyptian temple, an aide and confidant to Joshua, and a preacher in the Early Church of the Hellenistic period. It did not comfort me to have him add that I had been his son in the latter period; this seemed to lay the groundwork for his manipulating me in some way.
Indeed, possible manipulation was my main concern about the entire essay. He warned against a career in church music, which increasingly 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
