We pass on from Bishop Vandenburg and slide past Elder A. Theodore Tuttle, who stuck mostly to scriptural references (again, never a bad thing), and on to Elder Gordon B. Hinckley's address, entitled "Except the Lord Build the House..."
It's pretty weird for me to see Elder Hinckley this young - he would later become President of the Church. In 1971, he was a new-ish member of the Council of the Twelve.
This talk references how to create a happy marriage, and also brings us to the very first cultural reference outside of the Church from a woman - the novelist Pearl Buck.
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| A gem of a story from the wife of my eighth cousin twice removed... |
I was pretty happy to see this quote, because I absolutely loved The Good Earth, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. She was also the first woman to win the Nobel prize for literature. I would highly recommend this novel for anyone to read.
She's also our first and clearest example of the unusual situation we sometimes end up in with these cultural quotes, where truth comes from the quote, but not necessarily from the full work.
The Quote
"Pearl Buck has observed,
“Love cannot be forced. …
It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.”
(The Treasure Chest, p. 165.)"
Unearthing Another Novel
The reference for this quote came from one of the many quote books that circulated around this time, before the Internet set all quotes free.
The interesting thing is, this quote comes from another of Mrs. Buck's novels, entitled
"Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters" (written in 1946). Specifically, the line is phrased as:
“Love cannot be forced,
love cannot be coaxed and teased.
It comes out of heaven,
unasked and unsought.”
If you expand to a wider view of the work itself, you find the story of a wife who refuses to sleep with her husband anymore, now that her children are grown and her mothering work is done. She chooses a concubine to take her place in the household and retreats into a private life...or she tries.
I haven't read the novel yet, but it sounds super interesting. Would Elder Hinckley have chosen that quote if he knew the content of the story? Maybe he did, and thought the quote was appropriate anyway.
Pearl Buck never shied away from Chinese culture, which was often substantially different than the Christian culture of the West. Retiring sexually from my husband and handing him a concubine would not fly in my faith for multiple reasons, and is particularly ironic in this case, taken to illustrate a talk about ways to make a happy marriage.
So we see that, even though the quote rings true enough, the larger source could be quite a different story. But the Lord is funny that way. Even in a story with negative examples, there is often much of truth to learn even from the negative examples.
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