Elder Matthew S. Holland grew up in the old president’s home on the BYU campus while his father, President Jeffrey R. Holland, led the school in the 1980s with Sister Pat Holland at his side.
He returned to BYU on Tuesday to deliver a devotional that grew deeply emotional as the General Authority Seventy described the grief he felt after the death of his father three weeks ago, which followed the loss of his mother in 2023.
He called President Holland his best friend on Earth besides his wife and children.
“Losing him leaves an enormous hole for me,” Elder Holland said. “As long as I can remember, he brought laughter, confidence and wisdom to my life like no other. So, I wasn’t really prepared the other day when I turned on my phone and realized I needed to remove his contact from my favorites list.”
That realization struck him last week, and Elder Holland said it broke him.
“Never again would I get a call and hear that cheery, upbeat voice,” he said. “Never again would I get a little text-based love note, or inside joke or gentle correction about how to be a better man. Never again could I pick up the phone to get a nugget of needed counsel. Raw emotions tumbled out.”
The grief overwhelmed him in the afternoon, he told 8,026 people at BYU’s Marriott Center.
But as he brooded in a chair that night, he felt a repeated impulse to read his copy of the Book of Mormon. He opened it where he had last left off, Alma 58.
“We were grieved and also filled with fear,“ he read, ”… therefore we did pour out our souls in prayer to God, that he would strengthen us and deliver us.”
Elder Holland said he dropped to his knees and prayed, having found the strength, peace and deliverance he was missing.
“The Book of Mormon was the conduit, but the power was in Christ. We cling to his book to cling to him!”
The Book of Mormon’s writers and editors shared so many powerful narratives about wandering in wildernesses because God knew that readers today would be wandering in their own personal, metaphorical wildernesses, Elder Holland said.
Jesus Christ is the way, whatever someone is facing, and the Book of Mormon reveals that better than any other book, he said.
He noted that President Dallin H. Oaks said, in his first interview after being ordained this fall as the prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that the Book of Mormon teaches that Christ is the way five times.
Elder Holland said the Book of Mormon is uniquely powerful because he said “it is the purest and most extensive testament we have of Jesus Christ. More than any other book, it provides the ‘fulness of (his) gospel.’”
He said it also provides more direct witnesses of and language from Jesus Christ than any other book, he said.
“The Book of Mormon is only the ‘keystone’ of our religion because it is the most relentless, poetic and prophetic reminder we have that Jesus Christ himself is our ‘cornerstone,’“ he said.
Another illustration is the two views from the BYU Jerusalem Center — one of President Holland’s major legacies at BYU. On one side is the beauty of Jerusalem, the Promised Land. On the other side is desert desolation.
“Over and beyond every single wilderness lies a promised land, your promised land,” Elder Holland said.
“I also declare,” he added, “that your wildernesses are way stations, not destinations. You are not meant for pain, loneliness, failure and confusion. You are meant for bliss.”
He shared a clip of his mother, Sister Holland, talking about her near-death experience and how she clung literally to the Book of Mormon, wanting to clutch it to herself when she slept when President Holland was on assignment.
Elder Holland said his sister, Mary Alice Holland McCann, rounded up all of the marked volumes of scriptures in their parents’ home. He showed the picture she sent him of more than 40 volumes laid out on a bed.
“If there is a single image that captures my parents’ life-long love affair with the scriptures — all scripture, not just the Book of Mormon — this may be it,” he said.
He urged listeners to move toward their promised lands with optimism and faith.
“For those seasons of wilderness-like detours and difficulty,” he said, “I join Isaiah of old in solemnly witnessing to every student in Zion that God lives and can be trusted to help and bless you to the uttermost.”
Elder Holland himself graduated from and taught at BYU. He then served as president of Utah Valley University, 4 miles up University Parkway in Orem.
At the start of his talk, he teased BYU President Shane Reese, the resident Cougar sports fan-in-chief, about UVU’s 2016 win over BYU in men’s basketball. In that game, the Wolverines scored 114 points, setting the record by an opponent at the Marriott Center.
In reality, he and his wife Paige, also a BYU graduate, are huge Cougar fans, too.
“I am not sure what color blue and green make, but the Hollands bleed it,” he said. “We treasure both these remarkable institutions.”
