Presences: A Bishop's Life in the City.

An Episcopal bishop who is a family friend always had a funny quip to allay my fears when I was growing up. On the question of life after death, he used to say it was foolish to worry about the furniture in heaven or the temperature in hell. Paul Moore, the retired Episcopal bishop of New York, takes that thought a bit further - some say too far - in the epilogue of his appealing autobiography. Moore theorizes that if heaven and hell exist, they are the same place. The sheer presence of God, he explains, would be heaven or hell, depending on the sins of the beholder. Refreshingly frank about his own sins and shortcomings, Moore says he'll take his chances on God's mercy if there's such a thing as Judgment Day. And if there's nothing awaiting him but eternal sleep, he's not terribly worried about that, either. After all, he'll never know the difference.

Moore, known as a compelling preacher, doesn't claim to be a theologian. Some sixty years after he first felt God's undeniable presence while making his first confession at seventeen, he is still almost boyishly in love with what he calls "the mystery of being" and thrilled by the adventure, a word he uses again and again, of putting the gospel into practice. Born in 1919, Moore grew up in palatial mansions in Morristown, New Jersey, and Palm Beach, Florida, and received a gentleman's education at Saint Paul's School and Yale. With his vast wealth, intellectual vigor, and lifelong dedication to empowering the poor, he's been compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Like FDR, he's also been called a traitor to his class. Other critics complain that his emphasis on social and political action has helped turn many away from the Episcopal church.

But Moore seems never to have had any doubt that politics, inasmuch as it can save or ruin lives, is God's business. In 1951, he accompanied Thurgood Marshall to Mississippi to protest the false arrest and subsequent murder of three black men. At the partially demolished headquarters of voters' rights activists, he conducted Mass with an ironing board as the altar. He marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 and was tear gassed during a peace march in Saigon in 1970.

Moore recounts stories about his life among the very rich, the very poor, and the very powerful with an amazing lack of self-consciousness. Although he never patronizes the poor people he lived among during eight years in Jersey City, neither does he underestimate the buoying effect on his own life of a large trust fund. With a keen appreciation for absurdity, Moore remembers how in 1941 he and a buddy shopped for boots at Abercrombie and Fitch on their way to Marine boot camp. But however pampered he and his peers were, the ethos of the rich in 1940 demanded total sacrifice for God and country in war. As an infantry leader on Guadalcanal, Moore was shot in the chest. With typical underdramatization, he recalls that as he lay near death his thoughts weren't of God or Judgment Day, only that this jungle was a strange place for someone like him to die. The terrible experience of killing a Japanese laborer who appeared to be a soldier helped teach Moore how easy it is for a military man, whether he's a U.S. Marine or a Nazi, to convince himself that the enemy is inhuman. Moore ultimately became a visible peace activist during the cold war and Vietnam. But while he chastises George Bush for going to war for oil in the Gulf, he never fully articulates a practical or theological strategy for dealing with Saddam Hussein or another Hitler. For better and worse, his focus is narrower.

In that context, dealing with his own personal wealth has always loomed as an important issue for Moore. Although somewhat embarrassed by his inherited good fortune, the bishop chose activism for the poor rather than self-flagellation. If he had more courage, he writes, he might have given his entire fortune to the poor, as his idol Saint Francis of Assisi did. But he decided that would be irresponsible toward his nine children and that it wasn't necessary to impoverish himself in order to empower the poor. One can read that decision as either sensible or self-serving, and Moore seems to have read it both ways himself. Charity tends to comfort the giver and humiliate the receiver, Moore argues, therefore it's better to raise taxes on the rich to support a more equal distribution of wealth than to count on the intervention of patrons and saints.

The bishop writes frankly but not too revealingly about his personal life, including his ambition, his depressions, and his estrangement from his first wife, who died of cancer in 1973. These and other painful incidents, like the discovery that his daughter was sexually abused by a Jersey City parishioner, make us wonder what anguish he has left off the page.

Although it is clear that God has been the unifying force in Moore's life, overall this book is more about the struggle to live according to God's will than the struggle to articulate an explanation of faith. It would be easy, from afar, to view Moore as an activist first and a bishop second, just as Mother Teresa was often erroneously regarded as a social worker. But Paul Moore is committed to the gospel, and finds spiritual inspiration there for all his controversial works, including the ordination of women and homosexuals.

Strangely, or perhaps not, Moore's high-profile activities around the globe are the least engaging part of Presences. As the bishop freely admits, he wasn't the leader of the movements he championed, only a presence within them. His essential presence is felt in the city parishes he describes so vividly and, finally, as he leads us on a tour of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, that great Gothic space on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where he reveled in making everyone feel not just welcome, but equal.

Bethe Dufresne is a reporter and columnist for The Day in New London, Connecticut.