Winchester Minister Walks for Aids

“At this point in our lives, it would never occur to us that the first Sunday in June is not a Sunday we set aside to do the Walk,” says Winchester minister Ken Orth of he and his husband George Paolucci’s participation in AIDS Walk Boston. The walk benefits the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts.

They’ve walked every year since 1989, and memories of the early days of the epidemic keep Orth motivated.

In 1976, Orth was ordained as a United Church of Christ minister; he was openly gay. Throughout the 1980s, much of his ministry consisted of doing memorial services and funerals for people who had died of AIDS.

“There were many churches that just would not do a funeral, and clergy who would not participate in people’s memorial services,” recalls Orth, who lost many friends to the disease. “Many of my friends were in that situation. It was a very difficult reality, but it truly motivated me to do what I could to make sure we understand that God's love includes all people.”

One of those friends was a funeral director at Waterman Eastman Funeral Services. “He opened his funeral home and offered services when others would turn people away because they wouldn’t touch the body [of someone who had died of AIDS],” says Orth, who performed his friend’s memorial service at Old South Church.

Today, Orth still ministers at Old South, where he leads a Healing Worship Service the second Sunday of every month at 10 a.m. It began mostly with people who were affected and infected by HIV/AIDS. But it has since come to be a place where people come "from all walks of life" come for healing.

“We work together on opening ourselves to the spiritual love of God and the healing power of God,” Orth says. “And, of course, healing is not curing. But healing is being accepted and loved as a whole person, body, mind and spirit in whatever condition we are in.”

Orth is also the pastoral counselor and spiritual direction affiliate for the United in Winchester, where he devotes the bulk of his time as a minister.

Orth’s goal is to raise $1,000 for the walk.

The day of the AIDS Walk, Sunday, June 5, will mark the 30th anniversary of the first reports of what would come to be known as AIDS.

“It’s harder to get people aware,” Orth says. “It gets harder to raise the awareness that the needs are enormous and that the needs include all sorts of things including meals, housing, support and education. The epidemic is not over by any means.”

AIDS Action uses money from the Walk to provide services ranging from fuel assistance to counseling to HIV testing to housing support to the one in six people with a diagnosis of HIV living in Massachusetts.