Brenda Wilbee's "Living With Ravens": #20

Roy Wilbee standing beside his stone wall

Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple.

I WAS NINE when my parents moved to Meteor Ranch, a Christian Camp and Conference Center in Northern California. One of the things Dad did while we were there was to build a fifty-foot rock wall at the end of the swimming pool, and it was a lovely hot summer day when he made the stone plaque to be set into it. My two sisters and I watched as he first tried one thing and then another to create the letters. He finally used medical rubber tubing.

BRENDA WILBEE, 9 years old, Meteor Ranch 1962

“Let yourselves be built, as living stones, into a spiritual temple.”

The plaque was duly installed and remained for more than fifty years after our departure.

At Dad’s death forty-one years later, in 2003, I used photography of that wall for his funeral brochure; something about the wall and plaque has always comforted me, and challenged me. How does one become a spiritual temple?

I didn't realize at the time my mother was doing exactly this. The woman who ran the ranch took in welfare cases as cash flow and didn't trouble herself with their care. I learned for the first time the shadow of evil; how it hid in the light and presented a persona of oozing holiness. She abused and misused the vulnerable, she robbed the elderly, she manipulated those fleeing addiction. She cheated them all, toyed with them all, skewered them all to their weakest points. She was a force of her own. No one stood up to her. I developed a healthy fear.

I watched her deny twelve-year-old Richie needed shoes; my father had to cut the toes out of tennies to save him foot pain. She stole his birthday money. She made him grow petunias in the roots of a tree and punished him when they wilted and died. She kept him at endless chores, and Saturday nights he sometimes fell asleep buffing the dining room floor for Sunday church. I can still hear the hateful shrill of her screaming only a few nights after our arrival, startling me awake and up out of bed with thudding heart and goosebumps like gravel on my skin. She had him outdoors in the moonlight, bare chested and skinny, hanging up his bedsheets while taking swings at him and brow-beating him with a tongue so sharp it made me bleed in my soul. I hid under my covers. His crime? He'd wet the bed. These things I witnessed and didn't understand. Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple. A month into our stay, she came after my sisters and me.

DIning Hall Meteor Ranch, 50 years later

Through those double doors she flew 50 years ago
and the tableware flew

Linda, Tresa, and I had just set the tables for the summer's first campers when in she stormed through the kitchen's swinging doors, sails unfurled and raging like a wind out of nowhere, sweeping the tables clean, first one arm and then another, tableware and cups flying. The metallic clattering, the skittering, the dull thud of plastic bouncing, the purple-faced screaming, the shock of it all put my sisters and I into paralysis. Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple. Our crime? We hadn't dusted the tables. No one told us to. My mother charged in, double doors swinging. That day on the ranch the battle line between good and evil was drawn.

I spent the remaining seven months watching my mother build herself, like stone, into a spiritual temple of protection--though I didn't understand it at the time and not until now. But her love for the afflicted never withered in the face of cruelty. She was a fortress for each man, boy, and troubled woman on the ranch. She lent a listening ear, offered a kind word, gave out special favors. When we didn't feel like going out of our way, she made us embrace the sad and lonely. She sent us on evening walks with blind Uncle Earl, joined us in playing afternoon dominoes with him, using his set of olive wood dominoes from Jerusalem with their shiny brass dots and interlocking pieces. She played tricks on Jack to make him laugh. She made friends with the women. She gave Richie a nickel for every spelling word he got right. Let yourselves be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple.

Dad's Wall 2012

A few years ago I went down to the ranch and, with my son's help, brought Dad’s plaque home. I asked Mum if she'd like to have it.

"Where did you get that?"

"Meteor Ranch."

"Meteor Ranch?” she asked, agitated. “I don’t remember this. Did we live there?”

"Yes, California."

Mum was fading into dementia. She could hardly see or hear as it was. She shuffled around the house constantly looking for things. A far cry from the woman who’d loved the unloved: the young boys, the old men, the recovering alcoholics.

"Yes, do you remember Richie? You were going to adopt him." I thought this would jar her memory, but she shook her head in frustration. "Dad made this plaque for the stone wall."

“You hauled it all the way up here?”

I don’t know if she remembers dad’s work or not. From time to time, perhaps. And while I'd known it could be a gamble, I was still disappointed the plaque wasn't quite the gift I’d hoped. But reading the words again and remembering what Mum couldn't of the day Dad had created each letter--my sisters and I watching, wondering what they would spell--I finally understood. My mother was a spiritual temple, not only at the ranch but throughout her life, befriending the lost and loving those very few would. Love as solid as stone.

My gift to her suddenly became hers to me. An answer to metaphor I finally understand.

Prayer: Thank you for the living example of my mother’s love for those we tend to ignore. May we all be built, as living stone, into a spiritual temple.