responsibility in everyday life. For my generation the task of separating the good from the bad in Marx and other utopians, while joining it to prophetic faith, had been central business, seen in Reinhold Niebuhr just as truly as in the picket lines where I had marched and been briefly jailed.13 When Cayce warned that America had to build social and racial justice or experience rioting in the streets and terrible hardship, with world leadership passing to the Orient, I knew that I had to take him seriously. He spoke to my deepest sense of the spirit of the prophets of Israel.
The other source of inner prompting to seek out Cayce was the choral music I conducted in my new college post. Music had always been my carrier of transcendence, as Cayce had correctly noted in his trance counsel for me. Theology was not. My sermons did not proclaim that God was dead, but an objective listener might conclude that He was misunderstood or overrated, compared with our own responsibility to take hold of our lives and our troubled world. Prayer meant little to me, except as a poetic exercise in worship. But serious music picked up the sense of a nameless Beyond. I could keep busy in causes. I could lose myself in the puzzles of scholarship. But music, especially sacred choral music, spoke of an Other before which I too often felt a stranger.
As June and I talked about the puzzling Cayce trance, we suspected there were clues from heightened creativity in music to help us guess what he might be doing. Both of us knew from long experience that highly disciplined singers, holding a sustained chord in a Latin motet or reaching for a racy Bach figure, could sometimes transcend their usual skills. They could reach notes higher or lower than when they were practicing alone, and in moments of ecstatic absorption together they could phrase with unexpected genius, finding their way into experiences they had never encountered—death on a cross, the love of a mother for a holy child, flesh transformed and healed by spirit. They could even touch into far centuries of plainsong, or distant worlds of Russian or Spanish anthems as though they belonged there. Such singing, we thought, might enter a state similar in principle to Cayce’s trance and only a breath apart from his attainment of distant or hidden knowledge.
So (after some further exchanges with Cayce) I left my courses at the university unfinished, as June did hers at the downtown graduate music school. My college classes went into the hands of a substitute, and another minister took the weekend church. We piled our belongings into boxes and barrels to move to Virginia Beach for the rest of the school year, answering Cayce’s invitation to help him and to explore for ourselves his striking claim, “I don’t do anything you can’t do.”
Most difficult to leave was the Navy choir that I had rehearsed and conducted daily at the college all through the summer and into the fall. The singers were students in a V12 program for technical specialists, who had grown skilled at their choral art, performing entire programs from memory. When I took them on short concert trips and sent them tramping down the aisles of auditoriums in their gleaming whites, voices ringing in male harmony, they seemed to stand for all the heroism required of young men in wartime. Audiences caught up in the spell of their marching songs or tunes from musical plays could move easily with them into the hushed or elevated spell of a spiritual or a chorale or a motet.
Some of the strongest music we sang came from the mystical tradition of Russian Orthodoxy. One anthem that I arranged, by Tschesnokoff, started with low voices in subdued harmony, reflecting in open fifths on the claim, “Salvation is created.” Then a bold melodic leap in high voices opened up the rest of the thought: “Salvation is created in midst of the earth. Alleluia!” The full choir passages that followed required all the singers’ vigor, until the music bowed down to a deep-toned, sonorous, and hushed resolution. When we spoke of the text in rehearsal, I confessed that I knew little of what salvation was, though I was sure it had in it freedom from war, freedom from hunger, freedom from tyranny, and freedom from discrimination. Beyond that I could only guess. But there was reason to suspect (as I told the men in stumbling phrases, explaining why we were leaving) that much more might be trying to unfold itself “in midst of the earth” during bloody and trying times. Cayce might be part of it, and we had to know. They understood. All of them in the room grasped that this was the season to reach for the farthest goals, the truest visions. All of us knew it was a time for dying, when some in our ensemble could soon meet violent death on a far battlefield or beachhead. So at our last rehearsal they stood and spontaneously sang to June and me, without conductor but with wondrously sensitive phrasing, the Russian anthem as their blessing on our venture. The image of these earnest young men stayed with me as a fierce demand to make every step of our Cayce journey count—in part because word came within months that two had already been killed.
1Sugrue, Thomas. There Is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce, 1942.
2Cayce, Edgar, What I Believe, 1976, p. 23.
3Friedman, Maurice. Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, 1955.
4Murphy, Gardner, Challenge of Psychical Research, 1961.
5See Rhine, J.B., The Reach of the Mind, 1947. See also Rhine, Louisa, Hidden Channels of the Mind, 1961, as well as Psi: What Is It?, 1975.
6See Case, Shirley Jackson, exponent of this viewpoint, as in his Jesus, 1927.
7Bultmann, Rudolf, “New Testament and Mythology” in Bartsch, H.W., ed., Kerygma and Myth, 1961. See also Ogden, Schubert, Christ without Myth, 1961.
8Bro, Margueritte Harmon, Every Day a Prayer, 1943.
9Heard, Gerald, Training for a Life of Growth, 1959.
10Bro, Margueritte Harmon, Christian Century, June 2, 1943, pp. 664-665.
11Cayce, Edgar, Edgar Cayce, His Life and Work, Association for Research and Enlightenment, 1943, p. 10.
12Cayce, Edgar, Am I My Brother’s Keeper?, 1942. Reprinted as Times of Crisis, 1945.
13Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society, and The Nature and Destiny of Man, vols. 1, 2, 1943.
CHAPTER 2
Mr. Cayce, I Am Dying
It was nighttime and raining when we arrived in Virginia, after traveling two long days in a train crowded with service personnel of many ranks. To get into Norfolk, the country’s great naval port jammed with wartime shipping, where we could take a commuter train to nearby Virginia Beach on the exposed coast, our string of railroad cars had to be ferried across the large, unbridged port river that bordered the city. As we glided through the dark, our train appeared to be riding on the water. It seemed that we were leaving behind what was substantial and safe, breaking from the mainland of our lives, either for great discovery or great disappointment.
As a cab at Virginia Beach took us from the train station to a waterfront inn, we were stunned by the overwhelming darkness. Peering at the rainy streets, we could dimly see the outlines of a few closed shops and unlit buildings two or three stories high along the ocean. The scene was eerie, because a complete wartime blackout was enforced so that light from the shore would not silhouette great ships coming to the nearby entrance of Chesapeake Bay and the Norfolk port. The cabdriver told us that local people had watched more than one ship sunk by German submarines lined up right off this coast, after which bodies and debris had washed onto the sandy beach for days. To prevent further catastrophes, every window in the resort community was heavily curtained at night. There were no streetlights or store lights at all. Autos drove with headlights painted to allow only slits of beams for navigating. The
