Source: New Yorker
The New Yorker has now published to the web the excerpt of a book by his daughter about the late Bishop Paul Moore, who was a major force for social justice and religious tolerance in the Episcopal Church. [see Qnews summary]

The author, Honor Moore was appropriately named by her parents, because she honors her father in the book, A Bishop's Daughter. He was, she says, "a force of imagination that flared and coruscated, an instrument of transformation."

The book is -- even in this brief eight-page excerpt -- a remarkable memoir of a remarkable man, but it is also the story of a grown child's fumbling attempts in adulthood to come to understand her parents.

In the 70s, after her mother and the bishop had separated, her mother -- who would die of cancer a few years later -- tried to tell  Honor about the sexual frustrations of their marriage. But, like so much else -- including a book of erotic male nudes that she'd stumbled across years before in her father's study, it wasn't something that the daughter wanted to know about her parents at that time:

But this, like the picture of the young man in the book of photographs, was nakedness I did not want to see -- my father, fumbling and insensitive as a lover; my mother new to sexual pleasure in her forties. It would be nearly two decades before I learned of my father’s hidden life and the deeper suffering behind my mother’s painful announcement.

Like most children, Honor didn't understand her parents or the struggles they faced in their marriage. She admits to being uncomfortable with some of the discoveries she made about them when she was an adult.

Having entered into what I now understand to be a marriage of their time, my parents had no language to explore what might have been wrong with their erotic life. Instead, they began to feel mutual disappointment. My mother, being a woman of her era, considered the problem hers. Decades later, I learned that when we were living in Jersey City each of my parents was visiting a “shrink” in New York.

Although it's a minor part of the overall story even in this excerpt, the aspect of Honor's recollections of her father that has gotten the most attention are her descriptions of finding out about her father's mostly secret love life with men. That he was gay or bisexual  was not something that she'd been willing to come to terms with during her father's life.

In fact, in an audio interview by the New Yorker, she says it's not something that her father was willing to discuss with her.

After her father's death, Honor was in her apartment, unpacking items from her father's estate when the telephone rang:

He had a confident voice. Andrew Verver (as I’ll call him) was the only person in my father’s will whose name was unfamiliar when we sat in the lawyer’s office the day before the funeral. Its mention had passed without comment, but later Rosemary identified Andrew as the man who had travelled with my father on a trip he took to Patmos the summer before.

Two months earlier, I had gone to the cathedral press office to pick up copies of my father’s obituaries, and among the papers had been a letter from Andrew Verver dated the day after the funeral. He had been a “very close” friend of my father’s for nearly thirty years, he wrote in a crooked but clear hand. He would like to visit my father’s grave. He would like to see the videos that had been shown at the reception after the funeral.

I wrote him back that day: Of course you can visit Pop’s grave—I will try to get directions for you—I would also very much like to meet you. I’d love to hear about the trip to Patmos. My # is . . . He had not called in September, but now it was my father’s birthday, and here he was.

...

Andrew had been a student at Columbia, a Roman Catholic. “I was considering being received into the Episcopal Church,” he said. This was in 1975. “I went to your father for advice. He was very helpful. At first it was a pastoral thing, and after a while we became friends.” His voice was soft in texture. “We were very close friends,” he repeated. “Paul came to my father’s funeral. My family knew him.”

“I’m so happy to be talking to you,” I said.

“I would have called sooner--”

“I understand.” Then there was silence.

Several times during that first sometimes halting conversation with "Andrew", he repeated to Honor that he was "a very close friend" of her father's and that they had discussed many things about the Moore family during their time together.

The daughter who had blocked out so much about this aspect of her father's life finally recognized what he was telling her.

“Did he talk to you about his sexual life?” Two men in Greece, a beautiful night.

“I was his sexual life,” Andrew said.

“You were?” There was a silence and then we both began to laugh.

“For a long time.”

“I am so happy he had someone like you,” I managed to say.

“Of course, there were other men,” he said.

I asked him whether there was any significance to the table that my father had left him in his will.

“Only that it was next to the bed!” he said. “Your father had a sense of humor.” That quiet laugh again.

Honor -- the first of the Moore's nine children  -- was born while her father was returning home on a troop ship from World War II. He was, by then, a decorated war hero.

But her earliest memories are of her father at the seminary where he studied for the priesthood. "Unlike at Yale, where he was constantly striving to prove himself and partying to relieve the stress or in the Marines, where the requirements of his being an officer held him apart," she writes of her father's happy days at seminary, "he was one of many, a seminarian among seminarians.

She talks of revelation of being taken by her father to a prayer service in one of the seminary's gothic structures:

After that night, I looked at my father with new curiosity. He was no longer different from my mother just because he was the father and she wasn’t. He was in touch with something that couldn’t be seen but that was also real. When he left our apartment, he visited a place where utterance had a use beyond ordinary talk, was something frightening and beautiful.

Although her father was born to great wealth, and one of her uncles would run a major American bank, Father Moore chose to work with the poor during his first assignment when he joined two other priests in an inner city New Jersey ministry.

The ministry’s understanding, innovative at the time, of what it meant to be a Christian in a modern city led to political and social action on behalf of parishioners who were evicted, jailed, or excluded from illegally segregated federal housing projects.

Honor Moore evokes the scents of that time in her life. They were the special and unique scents of candles, incense, and stored vestments. Scents that themselves seemed to become sacred by their close association with the sacred spaces of the church.

In the sacristy, my father left being a father and a husband to become someone more like God -- God, who had a son but no daughters; God, who had had a son without touching a woman. In the sacristy, as my father put on his vestments, I watched him become more like Jesus. When my father put on the long white alb and the colored chasuble over it, and knelt at the altar and raised his arms, he became more like Jesus still: someone without skin, without smell, without weight, in a separate dimension where everything shone from within and existed beyond any sound but music.

As an adult, Honor had a falling out with her father and rarely spoke to him until after he'd been diagnosed, in his 80s, with a terminal cancer. But even during their long estrangement, she could come under his spell as she did in 1986 during an AIDS memorial service at the cathedral in New York:

In his crimson chimere and white rochet, he climbed the pulpit and began. It was a sermon about sexual freedom, about the lives these dead men had lived, about the presence of Christ’s sacrifice in human suffering. This was not a new subject for him, but I had never heard him so fierce, so passionate, so loving. What came to me was this: Here is where I can come to find my father’s love. There is, I told myself, magnificence in how he can give, opening his long arms, practically weeping on behalf of these men, dead of a plague; here is where I can come to be close to my father.

When she finally met Andrew Verver years later, she would discover that his name had been mistakenly included on the long list of names read before the bishops sermon of those who had died.

Andrew and Paul hadn't spoken for several months prior to the service. Paul thought, during his sermon, that his very good friend had died.

Andrew pulled out a thick folder of letters, twenty-five years of letters, and I began to leaf through them. I’ve already asked Fr. Pridemore . . . to raise you from the dead—the strange line jumped out.

“Raise you from the dead?” I asked. “What is this?”

“We hadn’t seen each other for a while,” Andrew said. “There was a mistake. My name was on the list of those dead of AIDS read at that Mass, and Paul heard my name, that I had died. It was a mistake. A friend of mine had died, and I’d submitted his name.”

“What happened? Did you go up to him afterward?”

“I couldn’t get to him, but he called my number that night.”

Full article: Personal History: The Bishop’s Daughter: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker