Two Cups of Tea at Hope’s Café
I preface this blog with this introduction. Much as I miss ministry and even more the people I ministered to and with, there has been some relief in this time of moving, getting settled, and taking care of my health, to be without duties or deadlines. One of the things I have indulged in in this time is reading for pleasure. Searching for any Barbara Kingsolver books I had missed reading, I discovered instead an historical novel by Barbara Davis titled The Echo of Old Books. It was here I discovered the concept of psychometry and my curiosity was piqued.
The term psychometry was coined by physician Joseph Rodes Buchanan in 1842. It could be described as a type of paranormal activity. A psychometrist could, by handling an object, a ring for example, sense its history, the lives connected to that object. In the Davis novel, the protagonist, owns a used book store and experiences this unusual ability to sense the life of the person or persons who previously owned the book. Davis’s character, Ashlyn, the store owner, describes books as intrinsically linked to the reader:
“Without a reader, a book was a blank slate, an object with no breath or pulse of its own. But once a book became part of someone’s world, it came to life, with a past and a present—and, if properly cared for, a future. That life force remained with a book always, an energetic signature that matched its owners.”
The book is an intriguing read. However, as I prepared to write this blog, I was drawn into the history of psychometry and to the originator Joseph Buchanan. Buchanan might well be described as a “polymath” that I wrote about awhile back. Apparently a precocious child, he began at age seven to study geometry, astronomy, history and French. By age eleven, he was reading works by the social reformer and politician Robert Dale Owen and with tutoring from his father (who was himself an itinerant physician, teacher, writer, printer, inventor and philosopher), Buchanan studied Blackstone’s Commentaries on the laws of England. Intending to go into law, his career plans were disrupted by the death of his father. He put his energies into becoming a printer, later a teacher, and finally took up the study of medicine.
Buchanan came into medicine at a time when the frontier of Ohio and Kentucky where he had grown up was lacking trained physicians. The field was wide open for a variety of unorthodox treatments to emerge. At least seventeen different varieties of doctors were practicing in the Midwest, ranging from the skilled and knowledgeable to quacks who would prey on the ignorance of the pioneers.
Hugh M. Ayer, in an article titled “Joseph Rodes Buchanan and the Science of Man”, he notes that into this period of confusion and controversy:
“… there appeared in 1842 a man possessed of a brilliant intellect, the zeal of a crusader, and a burning determination to revolutionize the medical profession. Arming himself first with the respectability of a medical degree, he proceeded to combine elements of phrenology, mesmerism, homeopathy, and eclecticism, add a host of original ideas of his own, and emerge with a system of moral philosophy and medical science which anticipated parts of modern psychology and psychiatry, and which contained some theories now recognized as valid by the medical profession. But his ideas were exceptionally strange even for that age of unorthodoxy, and he was destined to a lifetime of ridicule, rejection, and disappointment.”
Whether his ideas seem to have some merit or strike you as ridiculous as they were sometimes perceived during his lifetime, the drive to learn, to create, to explore possibilities seems worthy. As Albert Einstein said, “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”
The invitation is open to share “two cups of tea” anytime at Hope’s Café, or anywhere you share companionship and conversation.
May we be bearers of hope, the “wait staff” of Hope’s Café for each other and all those we encounter. Shalom, Kate
Hope's Cafe 