Love

Wouldn’t it be a better culture, a better society, if we had people who are truly free? I don’t mean free to indulge every base desire. That’s not freedom. That’s just being a puppet of your desires. I mean spiritual freedom. Spiritual freedom leads to fearlessness and fearlessness leads to love. The most loving people I know are the most fearless, and the most unloving people are the most fearful. -Li-Young Lee, 2015

I was raised in a small white-working-class logging town in the Pacific Northwest, a couple of hours from a more remote but bigger port town of the same kind, where my dad had grown up fishing the rivers of the Washington State peninsula. As a kid, I followed him along the banks of those rivers and learned about the depths and contours of a life well lived—what mattered, and what could be let go to drift away.

For many years in my adulthood, the cancer diagnosis my father lived with was a muted threat. But then the symptoms worsened, and the test results brought back panic-inducing numbers. Treatment options narrowed. Finally understanding he was dying, my father spoke to me in the soft-lit room of a threadbare nursing home in Seattle. When I try to remember those conversations, all I can come up with are fragments, but I know that we talked as we had always talked, honestly and directly. Whatever else we said, underlying our words was a repetition: I love you. I am here.

In the years leading up to that ending, we argued as we had always argued, often and sometimes bitterly, about politics. We tried and failed to persuade and concede. But even in the most contentious moments, there was never a question of where we stood with each other. We never stopped speaking—we always stayed on speaking terms. This has come to mean a great deal to me now that he is gone.

Some things never leave a person: the voice of the father who raised you, the unmistakable pull on the line, a salmon off the riverbank, bright, hidden, and strong—fighting the hook and the reel.

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My story of grief, and the absence I live with, is just a small part of the whole. We all live with cavernous losses, and we have to decide how to fill them, with fear, and its false promises—if you hide from this hardship, you’ll be safe—or with love, and the task that it ceaselessly carries out in us, as it “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

To attempt to live a life defined by Christian love is daunting, in part because we know that we cannot do it on our own. People of faith in the Christian tradition are strengthened in our efforts by our belief in the presence of God in our lives, and by our habitual commitments: prayer, worship, reading and reflecting on the words of the Bible.

At the heart of these essays is another claim to set beside these faith-based ideals: that religious life can be deepened and broadened by reading literature. In poems and stories, we find new ways to understand others—especially those whose experiences and backgrounds are very different from our own—and ourselves. We find words like “love” illuminated so that, instead of being abstract concepts, they become real in our hands. Literary texts, in their fierce beauty and complexity, can help us learn how to be the people we are called to be in this world, and to prepare for what will inevitably be demanded of us in our most difficult moments.

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I first read the poem “Persimmons,” by Li-Young Lee (originally published in 1986), in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, which I had decided to read in reverse, from the most recent entries all the way back to the beginning. In my set of five volumes, bought to turn the pages of my life toward graduate school (the 7th edition, published in 2007) Lee was just the fifth writer I encountered. I knew even then that anthologies were cultural battlefields, but I had not yet learned about the particular hard-fought history of how—and how recently—Asian American literature had become a recognized category within the artistic heritage of our country. The entries listed in the table of contents all felt permanent to me, fixed like the stars in the sky. This was the best of what had been written here, worth reading and essential.

Even in that glittering procession, “Persimmons” shines so intensely that the first time you read it, if you’re paying attention, you have to stop and look away.

Read the poem. / Read about the poet.

Embedded in what is surely the most famous description of love in the Bible (from which we have learned by heart that “love is patient; love is kind”) is a verse that is all about knowledge—what we can know about the world and ourselves. You’ve probably heard of it, too, in one or another translation or form:

For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. -New Revised Standard Version

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. -King James Version

“Persimmons” is a love poem, a set of interlocking stories about what it means to know and be known in the life of one person, one couple, one family. It begins with an act of ignorant cruelty, an open palm striking a child. It ends with a list of memories, spoken in the voice of the poet’s father, who recalls things known so deeply that they cannot be forgotten. This knowledge is so intimate and complete that it makes him who he is:

Some things never leave a person: / scent of the hair of one you love, / the texture of persimmons, / in your palm, the ripe weight.

It is a poem that takes many measures: the distance between people, and how to close it, the differences among words, and how to define them, the emotional weight of discrimination, assimilation, inheritance, and love.

I have spent considerable time with this poem, and if I were to read it every day for the rest of my life, I would always be better for it. My thoughts about the poem will deepen with each reading. But turning it over in my mind today, my thoughts are these:

When I think about the sections of the poem that tell the story of the child at school—the child of a family fleeing from a ruthless political regime, desperately seeking safe harbor and a future in this country—whose language and culture are misunderstood by the other children and torn apart and discarded by the teacher to whom his daily life is entrusted, I think: the pain is his, but the loss is theirs.

When I think about the section of the poem that tells the story of Donna—the woman who sees the poet face to face, whose voice speaks into the poem in a silent echo, repeating the words in Chinese: “Crickets: chiu chiu” [chiu chiu], who also hears the absences of forgotten words: “Dew: I’ve forgotten,” and whose body breaks the poem open into a recognition of the love between two people that is as secret as it is sacred—I think of this biographical detail that I read recently: “in fifth grade, Lee met his future wife, Donna, at his father’s church.” They are still married.

When I think about the sections of the poem in which the poet confidently tells the reader about persimmons (“How to choose / persimmons. This is precision.”)—the image and object that drives the poem from start to finish—I think of every word I’ve ever read about mothers and sons, and about how the child in the poem watches his mother’s hands, hears her words. Her hands become his hands, her words become his voice.

When I think about the sections of the poem that tell the story of the poet’s father—of the end of his sight, and the carrying over from vision into blindness the images he painted “hundreds of times / eyes closed” to etch them into his memory, of the “stupid question” his son asks him, answered succinctly and set aside, of his tangible, permanent presence, evoked through the poem’s description of him in all of his complexity—just like the first time I read this poem so many years ago, but now for different reasons, my breath catches, and I have to stop and look away.