When Mary Wed Abby

THE WATER IS WIDE
(Celebrating Six Years Of Romantic Justice)

The water is wide, I can’t cross over
And neither have I wings to fly
Build me a boat that can carry two
And both shall row, my love and I

Once, long ago, they charted different courses and followed different stars as they sailed toward their destiny and ever closer to each other. Neither knew the other would appear along the way like a treasured companion once lost and now found, nor that all of us—a church filled with friends, relatives and well-wishers—would gather to celebrate and honor this love they had shared for seventeen years.

There is a ship and she sails the sea
She’s loaded deep as deep can be
But not as deep as the love I’m in
I know not how I sink or swim

Theirs was a voyage and a love affair not embarked upon lightly. Two women whose intentions of the heart broke society’s rules of acceptable behavior with each smile and tender thought that passed between them. Now, no longer guilty of some unnameable crime, no longer forced to hide their love as if it were shameful, no longer barred from rites and privileges held high and unreachable by a world so myopic it could only recognize the most ordinary of love’s many guises, they came to our church to sanctify and solemnize their bond.

Oh, love is handsome and love is fine
The sweetest flower when first it’s new
But love grows old and waxes cold
And fades away like summer dew

How the heart overflowed to see their faces lit with joy and, yes, the nervous uncertainty of brides. How like brass horns welcoming home a host of angels did the words of the brief ceremony cut through the darkness of our separate lives to feed our hungry spirits. We were there to celebrate life and love, and to bear witness to two lives joining as one. There was no place in this centuries-old sanctuary for fears or concerns about hateful people, peevish politicians or homophobic religious groups. Such negativity could not be kept at bay indefinitely, but it would not find itself a welcome guest at this particular wedding.

The water is wide, I can’t cross over,
And neither have I wings to fly
Build me a boat that can carry two
And both shall row, my love and I

Now they are wed. The two are joined as one. And the voyages they chart, the waters they navigate, will from this day forward be mapped out on a single axis. A few short years ago, no one could have predicted we’d gather today to celebrate their marriage, in a church that has seen marriage vows exchanged hundreds of times in its 329 years. And though something profoundly different happened this morning, something also remained profoundly unchanged. So that one day, perhaps, with the sharp vision hindsight often brings, it may seem less significant that two women were married this day than that love, once again, overcame all obstacles.

Build me a boat that can carry two
And both shall row, my love and I
And both shall row, my love and I

Copyright ©2004 Paul Steven Stone
“Water is Wide,” traditional lyrics

Next month we celebrate the sixth anniversary of legalized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. I wrote this commentary at that time to celebrate the wedding of two women who, after years of sharing their love on the fringes of society’s acceptance, were now allowed to step openly into the center where all God’s children belong. I am proud to live in Massachusetts where even in our imperfection we sometimes get it right. This was one of those times.

The Church of Sacred Vampires

“Father Porter is coming!” a terrorized child would shout. Within seconds the hallways of St. Mary’s Grammar School would empty, its children fleeing in abject terror, knowing there was no one to protect them, no one to stand between them and a serial rapist and pedophile priest. A pedophile priest who loved to feast off their youth and innocence like a hungry vampire. A vampire who had been placed in their midst by a church seemingly, amazingly, shockingly unconcerned with their welfare.

A church that would move Father Porter from one parish to the next, from one hunting preserve to the next, for the next 14 years, putting hundreds of unsuspecting children within his sights and suddenly at risk.

Father Porter’s sexual crimes against children began before his ordination in 1959, but stepped up to epidemic levels in April 1960 when he was assigned to St. Mary’s Church and its parochial grammar school in North Attleboro, Massachusetts. By March 1964 he had been removed from his pastoral duties after molesting anywhere from 30 to 100 children—depending on whose estimates you believe—many of them repeatedly, some on a weekly basis.

After a year of treatment that included electro-shock therapy, Father Porter’s cure was accepted as a matter of faith, his transgressions were forgiven, and he was reassigned to Sacred Heart Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts where he would molest another 28 children before being removed to a different parish in just a year’s time.

And on and on it sadly went…

These days, stories of the Catholic Church shielding and enabling pedophile priests are so common it is easy for the mind to focus on statistics—the tally of children violated, names of parishes afflicted, millions of dollars paid to victims—that we often lose sight of the nightmare the victims endured or the young lives that were destroyed one after another by one rapacious priest after another.

Imagine what it must have been like for 11-year-old Paul Merry to be fondled by Father Porter on a weekly basis for three years. Or to be viciously sodomized, as happened to an 11-year-old girl who tried to intervene in Father Porter’s rape of a six-year-old child. And think what a living hell life was for two hundred boys who were repeatedly molested in a Wisconsin school for the deaf. The priest this time was Father Lawrence Murphy, and he regularly violated defenseless deaf boys in his office, his car, on class excursions, at his mother’s country house, in the confessional and in their dormitory beds at night. There was no safe haven from Father Murphy, no “Get Out Of Hell Free” card for these deaf and vulnerable children of God.

Father Murphy, who was never charged with a crime or defrocked for his sins, had been promoted to run the school in 1963 even though students had complained about his predatory behavior back in the late 1950s. Documents show that three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told of Father Murphy’s crimes against children but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities. Instead, the not-so-good Father was eventually transferred to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin where he spent his last 24 years working unhindered with children in parishes, schools and even a juvenile detention center.

Anyone who reads a newspaper knows these events aren’t isolated, nor are they anomalies. Given the large number of children molested, the many years those crimes were kept hidden, the long list of bishops and cardinals involved in the cover-ups, the number of dioceses and countries affected, it’s shockingly clear the leadership culture of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church is corrupt. So corrupt it could foster the commission and concealment of unspeakable acts against two generations of children. So completely corrupt it would take outsiders and lawsuits and a rising sea of outrage to force the church to finally start valuing the safety of children over the privileges of priests.

When you read how blithely and indifferently the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church responded to the savaging of children by priests, when you watch with disbelief as archdiocese after archdiocese, country after country, joins the list of the vampire priests’ feeding grounds, you realize those who stand guard over the Vatican long ago abandoned Jesus’ precepts in order to protect and perpetuate their own power and privilege. Even when local church officials took action, as did Archbishop Weakland of Milwaukee who asked his superiors to defrock Father Murphy, requests were almost uniformly met with an indifference that resonated all the way from the inner walls of the Vatican.

How strange then that this enabler of pedophile priests, this destroyer of childhoods and lifetimes, this institution too-tightly-held by the corrupters themselves to ever really change, should tell others how to live their lives, how to vote, who to like, what to think.

That these men who kept sacred the freedom and hunting privileges of priests who feasted on children could lecture the world on the inviolate rights of the unborn! What hypocrisy, what sham morality!

When will someone tell them they have lost their moral authority?

When will someone tell them they gave it up long ago on an altar of sacred vampires and broken childhoods?

And when will they ever change?

My apologies to any Roman Catholics who take offense at what I’ve said. My anger and disgust is not with them, nor with their religion, but with an institution that could so grievously abandon its responsibility to its flock. Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” I can’t imagine what he would have said about predator priests who cruelly suck the lifeblood and innocence from little children.

A Candle For Those Who Never Give Up

AN EASTER PRAYER

On this Easter Sunday I light our chalice for all the resurrectionists in the world. The ones who always get back up after a fall…those who lose at love but stay in the game…those who lose their job and let that loss be the gateway to a new career…those who come back to their sport after a devastating injury. I especially light this chalice for those who experience losses of unimaginable impact—the death of loved ones, the loss of their retirement savings, the destruction of their homes, the taking of their freedom—yet who refuse to succumb to cynicism and despair.

I light this chalice to honor and recognize the unconquerable resilience of the human spirit.

The above words were spoken as I lit the chalice last Sunday at my Unitarian-Universalist church in Hingham, MA.

Tales Of The Book Part Fourteen

THE RESURRECTION OF 11-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN

Somewhere long ago he was once a child.

His world was a child’s world where adults towered over the landscape in a wondrous sort of mute majesty and rarely slowed down to listen to children.

Somewhere long ago he was a blueprint of the man he might one day become. A youthful creature brimming with untested strengths and unexplored depths. But he was also small, needful and, most of all, vulnerable. He had to trust that the giants in his world would provide for his needs. That they would nourish and care for him, and keep him safe from harm.

Somewhere long ago he was once a child. And as a child he saw the world through an innocent’s eyes. So, when an adult in that world, a parish priest, rose up like a menacing shadow to darken his life, he could only fall back on his limited experience to understand what was happening.

And there was no understanding.

There was only a child lost in confusion and fear. A child deeply hurt and frightened. A child surrounded by people but engulfed by a sense of isolation. A child who felt guilty rather than victimized, as if by questioning the actions of a priest—a man as close to God as any mortal could come—he himself had done something wrong.

Somewhere long ago he was once a child and used a child’s logic to order his world. Thus, when he learned he could no longer trust adults to keep him safe, he did what he must to survive. He created boxes in his mind. Boxes to hold those things that frightened or angered or confused him. Boxes he could keep hidden. Hidden from the world, hidden from the priests, even hidden from himself.

In one box he placed his anger at his parents for not protecting him. In another he placed the memory of the innocence that had been taken from him. In another he placed his fear of intimacy, having seen what happens when you allow someone to come too close.

And in the largest box of all he placed himself, an eleven year old boy frozen in time. It was the only safe harbor that child would know.

Many years later the boy had grown into a man, and the boxes which had been buried in the darkness of his memory began to fall apart like broken dresser drawers. They would spill out their hazardous contents at the oddest moments. When he found himself standing outside a church. When he noticed how vulnerable his children seemed while asleep. When people who thought they knew him, told him how lucky he was to have the gifts he’d been given. Or whenever he felt threatened or frightened, like a little child hiding in a grownup’s body.

For many years those leaking boxes and their toxic seepage dominated the man’s life. They undermined his most intimate relationships, they kept him running from job to job, they sent him searching for relief in alcohol, drugs and an endless succession of mindless distractions. Worst of all, they unleashed on those he loved the pent-up fury of a rage that had been burning for most of his life.

Sitting there on the TV screen, somewhere on the other side of the continent, he talks to a reporter about his painful past and why, after all these years, he is finally confronting his demons and opening up his boxes. He is one of a number of men who are forcing the Catholic Church to face up to a pattern of almost bestial behavior by some of its priests. Forcing the church to acknowledge it had condoned crimes any civilized society would condemn as savage and depraved.

He is one of many such men who, like the lost boys of Neverland, never lived out their boyhoods but instead placed themselves, frozen in time, in their own inner boxes. And now the boxes are being open. The victims are telling their stories.

The healing has begun.

And the church, perhaps, is being dragged from its own peculiar set of closed and darkly hidden boxes.

But as he sits there at his kitchen table holding his five year old daughter in an unconscious protective embrace, I see more on the TV screen than the angry victim, the outraged reformer and the loving father.

I see the man whose blueprint—once tragically unrealized—was now coming to life. Resurrected after all those lost years. Hopefully to blossom, even with all the discovery and pain that still lay ahead.

For that blueprint, too, had been hidden inside a box.

Waiting for years in darkness.

Waiting to be uncovered and brought back to life.

Waiting for an eleven year old boy to whisper it was now safe to come out and play.

From “How To Train A Rock” by Paul Steven Stone, ©2009 Paul Steven Stone. It’s somewhat sad and amazing to realize I had first written this essay in 2002 and yet today so much still remains to be uncovered, so many wait to be healed, and, most sadly of all, those responsible for enabling, condoning and ignoring these bestial acts remain protected and unpunished. Later in the week I hope to speak further about the culture of complicity and elitism that allowed hundreds of priests to prey like vampires upon thousands of helpless children across the vast expanse of decades and continents.

Sidekicks Of The Canyon


A remembrance of a great spirit and friend.

Dear David:

There’s a photo I’ll forever cherish. It shows the two of us standing together, posing like two campfire buddies for the camera. We were starting a five-day rafting trip down the Colorado River. And there we were—poised to raft through canyons carved out millennia ago—two old friends, both a little overweight. Maybe you a little more overweight than me. Anyone could look at that photo and tell we were buddies, David, clearly comfortable with sharing each other’s space…two sidekicks of the canyon poised to begin yet another adventure.

That photograph came to mind several times over the course of the last seven months. The seven months it took for Cancer to write a triumphant final chapter to the last days of your life, the life of David Sumner Cutler. And it was a triumphant ending, David. Glorious in many ways. How wonderful for you to be surrounded by the love of family and friends. What a gift to have Josh, Ben or Carolyn read you the daily postings on your Caringbridge.org web site. And what a marvelous idea—a web site where all of us could go to celebrate and share memories of your life!

And so many people did. Over 4,500 visits.

You heard from old friends, aging marine buddies, former and current employees, minor acquaintances, children of friends, business partners, ex-wives, all manner of passersby on your journey through life. And many of them had a story to share. A story about you—about how you helped shape their lives, or mentored them, or made their lives richer, or taught them to be good journalists or helped nurture their communities. What a difference you made in their lives, Mr. Cutler, and we were privileged to witness you hearing it for yourself, taking it in, learning what an impact your life had on so many others.

But there’s a third sidekick who’s missing from the ‘Sidekicks of the Canyon’ photo, David, and she was definitely there—from start to finish—at your side all the way, a loving guide and navigator (and sometimes pizza-orderer), dear Catherine. She created a space around you that was large enough to contain all our pained spirits. I cannot say enough about your wisdom, Catherine, your generosity or your strength of purpose and insight. So many of us owe you a debt for your graceful, faithful management of David’s final days. Your strength gave us strength. You were the rock so many of us held onto as the tide steadily rose.

Catherine, I speak for all who hold David in their hearts when I say with sincere love and appreciation, “Thank you!”

The rest of your family was there, too, David, surrounding you with love and support. Foot massages from your sister Gail and twin sister Meg were little things that meant so much. Meg’s husband Jim taking night duty, as did Catherine’s brother Jay. Mindy and Patti lending their nursing expertise. And, of course there were your children, helping you, loving you, searching for their place in a world where one of their pillars of strength would no longer be standing.

I can hear you barking out their names in your best patrician voice: Josh, Ben, Jonathan; Mandy, Carolyn, Becky. And their spouses, your other children: Leslie, Nancy, Heidi and Mike. How you enjoyed those July 4th family gatherings, those outings in the boat with Mike and Jonathan, taking Becky to play softball or ride her horse, dressing up as Santa for all the little ones at Christmas. Nothing filled your spirit and brightened your skies better than family. Take a look at any photo with you holding a grandchild, David, and you’ll see the biggest, sloppiest, unabashedly happy grin splashed across your face.

Now, I would not be a true friend if I passed up this opportunity to remind local residents that your son Josh is running for public office, and you would appreciate their votes.

How proud you were of Josh’s efforts to enter public service, even when he lost in an earlier bid to become state rep. I remember you outside the polls pumping arms as if they were attached to water pumps, telling anyone who would listen “I’m Josh Cutler’s dad!” as if that obviously explained your excess of pride and enthusiasm.

Oh, what a delight you were when the wind filled your sails! How many lives did you enrich with that wide open, ready-to-engage spirit? With that ever-ready laugh, that eager expectant smile, those rich, patrician articulations you used both for scolding and pontification, none of which was meant to be taken seriously? You could sound like the severest Scrooge yet never lose that Peter Pan twinkle in your eye. A scold from you was nectar to a neophyte journalist or a struggling sales rep. You were the boss people complain about but really love—because you trusted them enough—cared about them enough—to push them outside their comfort zone, to test their courage and plumb their depths.

“Give it a try,” you would encourage them. “Go for it.” Always pushing them, opening doors, standing behind them. I know because, almost 30 years ago, I was a young inexperienced writer and you phoned out of the blue to offer me a weekly newspaper column. And thus, “A Stone’s Throw” was born, a column that would see hundreds of stories, essays and insights published in print and online across a span of 25 years.

What a gift to my life! What a candy store for a writer to be given! You changed my life, dear friend, even before you became my friend. You took a chance on someone who had no experience. You opened a door for me as a writer and gave me a forum in which to develop my talent.

Ah, the curious workings of fate that put two lives such as ours on intersecting courses? We were not always sidekicks of the canyon, nor would we have seemed likely candidates. You were a child of privilege, at least on your mother’s side, the Sumner side of your family tree. I was a struggling writer, born in the Bronx but capable of speaking fluent English. From such meager ingredients a great enduring friendship would arise.

You were never one to dwell on emotions, were you, David? Discussing emotions went counter to your natural reticence. How hard for you to say the words “I love you.” Remember that time in Norwell when I told you, as a friend, that I loved you? You responded like a burdened nobleman, declaring in a fit of noblesse oblige, “Well I guess these things must be said”, adding, “I love you, too” in a hasty conclusion. Watching you exchange “I love you’s” with all of us these last few months…well you came a long way, baby, that’s all I can say.

And when Fate (with a capital ‘f’) touched your shoulder and tested your mettle last summer, your overriding concern was not for yourself but for the impact your illness would have on your children, especially those who were youngest and most vulnerable. There was never a hint of complaint about life’s injustices, or the cruelties of fate, just a resigned Marine-like commitment to see things through as best you could. And so you did, Old Friend. With your customary grace and silent strength.

You were always destined to be a hero, David. It was in your DNA. Not just in Viet Nam where, by braving enemy fire to retrieve a fallen comrade, you received bullet wounds to both your legs. In some ways it’s easier to be a hero in war than in peace, in Khe Sanh rather than Duxbury, easier to take up the mantle of leadership in Viet Nam than in New England. But you were a hero for all seasons. The letters to your web site repeatedly speak of you as a personal hero to those who knew and worked under you. Hero, mentor, counselor, role model, inspiration and, always, friend. Raw testimony to your leadership skills in the trenches of the real world, in everyday life. You were huge in their lives, David, but you never saw it till the end. Just four weeks ago, before the Caringbridge web site was launched, you described your life as unremarkable—as if it had never been touched by greatness.

Most of us here today know the greatness contained in your life, David. But you never knew how good you were. Your huge heart, generous spirit and tolerant nature were so intrinsic to how you lived your life you couldn’t see how special they were. Nor could you see how many lives were influenced by yours. You and I shared each other’s secrets, but you never told me about the single mother you helped with a job, or the photo journalist whose career you launched with a camera, or the reporter you told not to worry about the $25,000 his story cost the paper, or the sick couple you kept on the payroll for six months, or the dozens of others who wrote to testify what a difference you made in their lives.

I always thought Viet Nam was the anvil on which your character was beaten, shaped and polished. But if Nam was the anvil then the United States Marines Corps had to be the hammer. The corps gave you a palpable sense of yourself, and of your capacity to overcome enormous odds, a guiding star that stayed with you your entire life.

How else would you have had the nerve to turn your back on a weekly paycheck from the Patriot Ledger to make the biggest decision of your professional life—to start publishing a community newspaper. You were all of 29 when you, your wife Suzie and Michael Sterns started the Marshfield Mariner with your saved-up vacation pay. You were destined to be a publisher, David. You knew instinctively which elements made for a good local newspaper, which stories to feature. When it came to the business side, however, your business model rivaled the bumblebee for its ability to fly when the laws of physics say it should never have gotten off the ground. By all rights, the Mariner papers should have gone out of business any number of times.

My writing a weekly column for the Mariner was the bedrock of our friendship. A friendship that over the years saw both of us neck-deep in one adventure after another. Running out of gas on the North River. Living as Odd Couple roomies when my marriage failed. Retracing the Colorado River expedition your Grandmother braved 65 years earlier. Discovering Iceland. Escaping from Iceland. Almost getting stuck on a sandbar next to Nantucket. Braving open seas in a boat too small for such nonsense. And learning to tell jokes about cancer and death, especially when cancer and death were staring you in the face.

“We joke about death and dying,” you proudly informed a visitor one day, as if we no longer followed silly outmoded social conventions. What better place for laughter than a sick room? Who better to laugh than the man whose remaining laughs could now be counted in single or double digits? And we had a lot of laughs during those last crowded months. Best of all, you got to hear from many folks who loved you, whose lives would have been different without you. Like George Bailey, the James Stewart character in “It’s A Wonderful Life”, you were given a glimpse of your life’s real value. And just like George Bailey, you discovered you were the richest man in town.

It was an honor being with you these last seven months, sharing the adventure with you and Catherine. Just as its been an honor sharing my road with you for almost 30 years. I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you for going away so soon, leaving me to carry on without my dear friend and fellow adventurer at my side. I had planned for us to grow old sitting in boats, talking about grandchildren.

But, as John Lennon said, life is what happens while you’re busy making plans. It was by the side of the pond at my Plymouth cottage that you first told me you were sick. Remember what I said? I said I wasn’t going to lose you. And I’m not. I’ll always have you in my heart, dear friend, in my memories, and in my prayers.

You and I will meet up again, someday, somewhere, eager for our next adventure, just as one might expect from two old and trusty sidekicks of the canyon.

Goodbye, David. I love you.

David Sumner Cutler passed away February 28, 2010. He was a wonderful fellow to have in your life whether he was your friend, father, partner, boss or neighbor. In giving the above eulogy I was fulfilling an ironic arc in which David, by discovering me as a writer, had chosen me almost 30 years earlier to chronicle and honor his life. As you can tell, I loved David, greatly enjoyed our shared time together, and looked forward to our growing old and serene together, secure in our friendship. Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans! Goodbye, old friend. Thanks for the laughs, the hugs and for just being you. Which was pretty special.