This is not a eulogy. The Rev. Dr. David Moore is very much alive. But he and his wife, Ms. Diane Moore, left Santa Barbara for South Africa, and those of us who love them are grieving. As Dr. Moore wrote in his Substack recently: “Our address is changing, but our affection for our community and our participation in its life are not ending.”
I first spotted David at a Black Lives Matter march in 2014. He was hard to miss: a tall African-American man with an afro moving through the crowd with a quiet authority. I ran into him again at an interfaith gathering at La Casa de María and asked him to coffee. I was working at the Fund for Santa Barbara and recruited him to our grant making committee. What he brought to that table was not just perspective but calm presence, passionate conviction, deep conscience, and a lightness that made the people around him want to be more generous, honest, trusting, joyful.
That sparked a friendship – and revealed something else: David was everywhere. We served together on the Planned Parenthood board where he gave deeply moving speeches to hundreds that connected voting rights to reproductive rights. He stood with Native Americans against the oil pipeline at Standing Rock. He was removed from his diocese — after 27 years — for his support of LGBTQ rights. He was a part of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. He served on the NAACP board, and was the keynote speaker at a conference on disability rights.
Today, he leads a congregation over Zoom spanning the Central Coast and far beyond, the most genuinely diverse community I’ve been part of in Santa Barbara. I am not Christian, but I attend services because of the shared values I’ve been missing in many of the liberal spaces I belong to.
What’s unique about David is how sincerely he saw himself simply as a friend. In 2018, I sat with him without a title or a purpose, just myself, holding so much loss. I did so because who he was made that possible. He offered no sermon, no lesson, just the compassionate witness I needed. That’s who he is in every room: present, unhurried, no judgment. Little did I know that he and Diane would host me at their Thanksgiving table, or that years later, he would officiate my wedding. Or that he and Diane would one day hold our baby in their backyard while we sipped fresh lemonade.
I am not Christian, but I attend services because of the shared values I’ve been missing in many of the liberal spaces I belong to.
Elena Anderson
Diane doesn’t fill a room the way David does — she does something quieter and equally powerful. The first time we brought our daughter, just weeks old, to their house, Grandma Diane walked me to my car. As we hugged goodbye, she whispered, with characteristic economy: “As a mother, ‘no’ is a complete sentence.” A mother of five herself, she wasn’t offering advice; she was offering the permission she accurately sensed I needed.
An early anti-genocide activist, Dr. Moore’s moral clarity was, as ever, clear. He spoke about his doctoral research on centuries of European persecution of Jewish people. And he spoke out on the occupation, apartheid, and genocide of the Palestinian people. It cost him. Some relationships grew strained. Some doors closed. Others tried to neutralize him. He did not waver.
I once asked him, catching up in his backyard, how he was taking care of himself. He paused — he is a man who pauses, who thinks before he speaks — and said that by standing on the side of those who are displaced, dispossessed, and excluded, he keeps his conscience clear. That is how he cares for himself. And his daily meditation practice.
A few weeks ago, community organizer Ana Rosa gathered the community for a farewell call. People joined from across the coast and beyond. Tears streamed down everyone’s faces as we searched for words that felt inadequate. Each person described how the Moores changed them. One attendee, Bob Harper, captured what many of us struggled to articulate: “David, you are gentle and relentless in your pursuit of justice, mercy, and love.”
David and Diane raised their family here, owned a home in Goleta, built a life and a movement. Still, they had described their financial future here as precarious. We must reckon with the fact that the people most committed to taking care of our community are often the ones least able to stay.
The Beloved Community they built, now rooted in Cape Town, will continue across continents. Inspired by Dr. King’s vision that the liberation of one people is bound up in the liberation of all oppressed people, the Moores create a space where people on the margins can heal, grow, and support one another.
I’m excited for them, but still ― Santa Barbara will feel the loss of a critical voice of conscience. Perhaps, we try to honor that by showing up however imperfectly, bearing witness unflinchingly, and fighting for what we love.
Gently. Relentlessly.
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