In March of 2022, President Jeffrey R. Holland traveled to West Point, New York, to speak to Latter-day Saint cadets at the storied military academy.
President Holland, with his wife, Sister Patricia Holland, ate lunch in the cadet mess hall, dedicated a new chapel near the academy and spoke at a special celebration marking 150 years of Latter-day Saint cadets at the academy.
It was a busy day filled with powerful sermons for those protecting freedom at a time of international conflict and war.
The moment I will remember most did not include words at all.
President Holland had just finished lunch when he spotted a single cadet in the almost empty mess hall. He walked up to the young man and placed his hands on both sides of his face, looking at him in the eyes. In response, the cadet put both hands on President Holland’s arms.
If the pair spoke, I didn’t hear it. But there in Washington Hall at West Point, time stood still.
I have always wanted to know story of the cadet who made his way to the mess hall that day and found himself in President Holland’s embrace.
But I am sure his story is not unique.
Today after learning of the death of President Holland at age 85 of kidney failure, I tried to write a fitting tribute.
But when pondering the life and mission of an apostle whose life was defined by words and the way he shared them, words failed me.
How do you use words to describe the leader whose sermons inspired millions? How do you write about a general authority whose talks made us laugh and cry, challenged us to do better and led us to Jesus Christ? How can anyone use words to summarize the life and ministry of President Holland?
So instead, my thoughts turned to the times like West Point, when he ministered without words.
One is most personal.
In October of 2021, President Holland, along with President M. Russell Ballard and Elder Quentin L. Cook — all former British missionaries — traveled to England and Scotland. There they met with missionaries and members and shared powerful testimony of their own spiritual conversions that took place amid the rolling green hills of Great Britain.
One morning on the trip, however, I slept in — the only time that has happened to me in three decades as a reporter and editor. Woken by a call from the hotel’s front desk saying my party was leaving, I grabbed my suitcase and raced to the waiting media car in a rush. The day was hurried; I was filled with stress, anxiety and inadequacy. Finally, as we were waiting for the final meeting that evening, I sat on a back pew in a chapel and tried to gather my thoughts.
President Holland walked by, paused, looked me in the eyes and placed his hand on my cheek. He didn’t say anything.
The wordsmith ministered without words.
I felt loved and seen and appreciated — a moment that to this day I cannot adequately describe.
And it is not the only time I watched President Holland minister without words.
In 2018, President Holland stood before a packed ballroom in Thailand and then paused — overcome by the sight of thousands of Latter-day Saints gathered in the country where the Church of Jesus Christ was still young.
When on the England trip in 2021, he and President Ballard and Elder Cook approached a historic parish church in Downham, England, only to find it filled with missionaries completing their training at the church’s England Missionary Training Center in nearby Preston. In that spontaneous moment, the leaders stood still and let the missionaries speak first.
And in November of 2022 in Germany, President and Sister Holland sat with Ukrainian refugees in the chapel of a Relief Society room, listening (but not speaking) as they shared their experiences.
President Holland once said he wrote dozens of versions of his general conference talks — refining words and phrases to form prose that only he could create.
Yet in his final conference message given in October, he testified of God’s power — evidenced in Jesus Christ’s healing of a blind man in John 9 — and then sang his testimony, borrowing words from poet John Newton’s “Amazing Grace.”
“Amazing grace — how sweet the sound —
“That saved a wretch like me!
“I once was lost, but now am found,
“Was blind, but now I see.”
It was different from any other moment or any other talk we ever heard President Holland share.
In retrospect, I suspect it was just one more time — the ultimate time — that the wordsmith’s message transcended words.