It’s the autumn of 1977, and my father, Bishop Paul Moore, has just ordained Ellen Marie Barrett, a woman of open lesbian orientation, to the Episcopal priesthood. In the wake of the resulting scandal, which included the possibility of his being censured by the House of Bishops, I go to see him to interview him for Ms. Magazine.

By the time my father traveled to Florida for the annual meeting of the House of Bishops eight months after Barrett’s ordination, talk was moutning that my father would be censured for ordaining her, an action that could lead to his being stripped of his orders. His opponents accused him of breaking faith; the bishops had laide out a timetable to discuss th eordination of gay people. My father stood by his argument: Why should a person honest about her orientation be penalized? . . . .Two of my sisters and I, together for a weekend in Washington, heard that our father was in danger of being defrocked, and sent a telegram of support. He called to tell us he had received a long ovation and that the resolution of censure him had been voted down, but the controversy about the inclusion of openly gay people in the ministries of the Episcopal Church was just beginning.

When I sat down in his office two months after the Florida meeting, my father was still putting out fires stoked by the ordination. I was looking forward to hearing about his adventures, but I had also prepared a list of questions. The editor at Ms. had assumed conflict between us, but now, for the first time since the 1960s, we seemed to have no political differences; there seemed to be no gap at all between the father I desired and the father I had,. Our talk was an interview, but it was also a reunion and a reconcilation. Listening to the old cassette thirty years later, I hear first our formality – he declares himself "very proud" of me "professionally" and I respond in kind. . . .

When he began to talk about Ellen Barrett's ordination, the formality gave way to the familiar pleasure of hearing my father tell a story. He and my stepmother Brenda had arrived at the Church of the Holy Apostles to find the Chelsea street mobbed with television cameras; they were led through a back entrance. He described the simple power of the service itself, the thousand letters that had poured into his office afterward, two thirds of them against what he had done, the parishes that threatened to withhold their contributions to diocesan work. When I asked how he'd managed to bear up, he told me about his visit to the Church of the Ascension three days after the ordination to preach for Integrity, the organization of gay Episcopalians. Seeing the church full, he presumed for another service, he found the parish hall empty, and panicked that he had the night wrong. "We're expecting you, Bishop," said a man who suddenly appeared, then led him into a church packed to capacity.

Some of the protest had been so vicious, my father was gun shy: he'd requested no publicity and had expected a small, easy group. "Don't worry, Bishop," he was told. Word had spread that he was coming and that Ellen Barrett would be there. The congregation was gay people and their families and supporters of all faiths, Roman Catholic priests, rabbis, women and men and their companions, children, old men with, he told me, "years of anguish" on their faces. Wanting to steer clear of controversy, he preached about love and suffering, how close the two are, concluding, as he often did, by reminding his listeners of the Resurrection, of "the new life that follows after redeemed pain, how the Church would be filled with new life when we were finally able to love everyone as he or she was made...." His voice filled with the wonder I remembered from childhood as he described the sacred feeling of the Eucharist that night, how people took their time receiving communion, how his purpose as a bishop and pastor came back to him in the midst of the love, and in what people said to him afterward. One man pulled him aside. "Until now," he said, "the Church has only offered to ‘help’ us. That is the very worst insult of all. We don't want to be bundled off to a psychiatrist. Now someone in the church, a bishop, our bishop, has ordained one of us. It's beautiful, man, beautiful."