Last winter, on a visit to Orlando, I traveled by van to a professional meeting at Disneyworld. On the way I admired the brilliant night sky that featured a full, white moon surrounded by bright stars. All of a sudden, however, I was struck by doubt forcing me to turn toward a colleague with a pressing question – “Is it real?”
This question frequently arises for me in Florida. I feel wary about the tricks of the Disney people and their collaborators. They know how to put moons and stars up into the sky and make them look like the real thing.
On my latest foray into Florida last week, I experienced the same blurring between reality and illusion. This time the site was a town called Lady Lake, some sixty miles northwest of Orlando. The place features a giant retirement community now numbering about nineteen thousand people, considerably larger than the surrounding towns. It is called “The Villages” and encompasses half a dozen or so enclaves in the form of gated communities.
The Villages’ Town Square consists of stores, restaurants, theaters, and other establishments, all made to look much older than they actually are. These buildings wear signs identifying the dates when they were supposedly built. The dates, however, turn out not to be real but rather to be invented so as to make everything seem of another era.
The most prominent building is a church, not built by any religious group, but rather by the developers of the Villages. It looms up tall and serves as the focal point of the surrounding area. In passing, the visitor notices “ruins” – low walls that purport to date from the time of the Spanish settlements. These, too, it turns out, cannot be taken seriously except as artifacts playing their part in the ensemble.
Village residents also make use of paper bills that look like the real thing except that they carry pictures of Mr. Schwartz, the patriarch who founded the Villages, on the twenty and his son on the ten. Everybody calls this “funny money” but it can be used as cash for purchases.
The powerful Schwartz family that developed the Villages plans to extend them across what are now neighboring fields. They will build many more houses and villas for the crowd of future retired people expected to pour into central Florida.
As must show in these words, I have trouble with the concept behind all of this illusion. Out of sympathy with the developers, I like to take my reality straight, without the sleight of hand that so much of Florida features. Please allow me to live with things as they are, rather than in a reality that has been engineered out of shape.
What I did find real, however, are the people who live in this retirement haven – at least those who come to St. Timothy’s Church where I had the pleasure to giving talks on aging and spirituality. The men and women who take part in the life of that church turned out to be vital and stimulating. My discussions with them renewed my hope for the future of our country, where aging will help shape the coming decades.
St. Timothy’s parish has enrolled an astonishing six hundred people as volunteers in some fifty ministries. They visit the sick, feed the hungry, bring holy communion to shut-ins, and work on social issues. As the woman who serves as a professional coordinator of the volunteers told me, “People here are very giving, they’ll do anything for anyone.”
Sitting down for an hour and a half with a group of six of these people, I discovered a lively sense of their group resources. As Milton, a retired marketing manager, says: “The one thing I love is there is someone here who has been there and done that, anything you want to talk about from jet engines to the stock market to putting in telephone wires. The amount of knowledge is staggering.”
So, I would add, is a spiritual resource – the will to serve. These volunteers identify strongly with their role as church ministers. They think of themselves as on the edge of a new church, one in which the ordained priest feels happy to acknowledge the lay priesthood of members. These people are unanimous in crediting their pastor for recognizing their role, as not simply supplementary, but as at the heart of what it means to be a church member.
And the volunteers feel rewarded in this ministry. “There is always someone to pat you on the back and say you did a good job,” enthuses one woman among them. Another says, “How much more I gain from this experience than I ever give!”
So in a land where illusion plays a large role, it is gratifying to find so many people for whom the reality of service to their fellow human beings looms so large.
Richard Griffin