Elder Hafen: It’s a genuine thrill for us to see all of you today. You’re a beautiful sight, even more beautiful than your parents and grandparents were way back when they were our students here. That reminds me—a guy from Kansas married a girl from California. As they came out of the little Kansas Church house and headed for the curb, their cheering relatives and friends lined up to throw little handfuls of wheat on them. The puzzled new bride whispered to her husband, “What are these people doing?” He replied, “They’re just happy for us, so they’re throwing wheat on us!” Surprised, she said, “Don’t these people know anything? You’re supposed to throw rice on new couples, not wheat!” He replied, “But honey, this is Kansas—it’s the wheat state!” She said, “Well! I’m sure glad I didn’t marry somebody from Idaho!”
Now let’s get into what we most want to share with you. That warm and familiar voice always made us feel like he was our friend, as if he’d never known a stranger; the delightful humor and the stunning spiritual insights—but now the voice has been stilled. We have a hard time believing the news. We aren’t ready to part with him, not Elder Holland. What rare gifts of affection and testimony he has always given us.
But perhaps he and his dear Pat could no longer remain separated. Once she was gone, it was as if some essential part of his very soul was already passing on. As he once said, “I wouldn’t know how to speak of heaven without my wife, or my children. It would not be heaven for me.” [1]
Why do I speak of Elder Holland with such reverent intimacy? From our earliest days, he and I were unusually close friends, with endless shared interests and experiences. We were born six weeks apart, lived in the same ward, and went to school and Church together during a peaceful, even idyllic, season. As he said at my mother’s funeral, perhaps there never was “a perfect time and place in which to spend one’s childhood. But if there were such a time and place, it was in Utah’s Dixie in the days of Bruce Hafen and Jeff Holland’s youth—those incomparable days of our beginning.”
After a few years of well-known career steps, Elder Holland became a General Authority in 1989 and an Apostle in 1994 at age 54. Apart from marrying Patricia Terry in 1963 and having their children Matthew, Mary Alice, and David (Duff), I believe his most crucial season was his mission from 1960 to 1963—the years that profoundly shaped the rest of his life.
Late one night in 1960, he and I sat and talked candidly in a car parked in a gentle St. George rainstorm near his home. The raindrops running down the car windows mirrored the tears that occasionally blinked down his cheeks as he thought out loud about his dilemma. He was in love with Pat—the only girl he had ever dated seriously. Pat was modest and bright, naturally beautiful, and a young woman of unusually deep faith.
When he was running for Dixie College student body president a few months earlier, Jeff had believed that if he won the election, he would need to be at Dixie the next year—so he would stay and marry Pat, rather than serving a mission now; and they could serve together later. But he had barely lost the election, perhaps because I was his campaign manager, just as he’d managed my campaign when I lost the year before. But now his bishop wanted to submit his mission papers. He had a testimony, but he was afraid Pat would marry someone else during his mission, and he couldn’t abide the thought of losing her.
Should he go now, or should he stay? Given the powerful impact his mission would have on his entire future, this was a far more crucial moment than either of them could have imagined. But perhaps Pat sensed something. He said she wanted what was “best for them,” not just “best for him.” Her further advice was something like, “Jeff, just go. The Lord will take care of us. You’ll grow and be better off. And the chances are pretty good that I’ll still be here.” She didn’t offer, and he didn’t ask, for a firmer commitment. But, finally overcoming his fearful anguish, he decided to go. It was an act of wrenching, but trusting, sacrifice to the Lord.
He was called to the London Mission just when the brethren were feeling strongly that it was time for missionary work in Europe to take a major step forward. But some careless proselyting in England had made President David O. McKay feel the need to send Elder Marion D. Hanks, a gifted young General Authority, as the new London mission president.
I asked Jeff about Elder Hanks in one of my letters from my own mission in Germany. I still remember his answer: “It’s great to feel like I’m finally on a mission and not just in on a big business deal.” He said Elder Hanks called time-out on everything else the missionaries had been doing, and he immersed them deeply—permanently—in the Book of Mormon.
Elder Hanks was a bright and perceptive teacher with a gentle sense of humor. His candor and his deep love for the Book of Mormon opened their eyes and hearts. He first assigned them to read the entire Book, marking all references to Christ. Then he had them read it again, marking all the doctrinal passages. Then he taught them Christ’s doctrine with “the soul of a poet-philosopher.” [2] He became Jeffrey Holland’s personal mentor and role model—and that gradually but deeply changed Jeff’s life.
After our missions, I was startled, even moved, to see how much he had matured, and how his own gifts of personality and insight had so rapidly developed. And now, inspired by his new mentor, he wanted to teach Institute—which had never crossed his mind before.
After teaching Institute for several years, Jeff wrote of his gratitude to Elder Hanks for introducing him “to the profundity of the Book of Mormon and the majesty of Christ that lay hidden there.” [3] He said no one loved the Book of Mormon more than Elder Hanks, nor “taught it with more power and conviction.” [4] And to the 2023 Seminar for New Mission Leaders, he said that “no young man was more affected by a mission than I was. My whole life was reshaped, and refined.”
Knowing how very hard it was for Jeff to dig deep enough to find the faith, the courage, and especially the sacrifice to go on that mission makes me feel absolute admiration for him. At his youthful age of 19, I believe he wanted Pat more than he wanted that mission—because he deeply feared losing her. He had no idea how the mission would profoundly change his whole life—and hers. But in pure trust, he finally bowed before the Lord and said, “Yes, I’ll go.” Could he have sensed the magnitude of the Lord’s promises, even then? “Dispute not because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith.” [5] And “all among them who … are willing to observe their covenants by sacrifice—yea, every sacrifice which I, the Lord, shall command—they are accepted of me.” [6]
With Elder Holland’s story as a backdrop, we want to add a few illustrations to express our concern about the shallow level at which some of us today make what we think are spiritual decisions or feel we have a deeply rooted testimony. When we’re young, many of us can too easily think we are feeling the Spirit. Our 5-year-old granddaughter was once in Costco with her mom. After cruising the store a long time to taste all the free, sweet snacks, she returned to her mom, rubbing her aching tummy. She said, “Mom, my tummy feels funny, and I can’t tell if it’s all the treats I’ve eaten or if it’s the Holy Ghost.”
A true disciple’s life requires a lifetime of spiritual experience, not just a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Helaman said, “the Lamanites were convinced … because of the greatness of the evidences which they had received.” [7] What does that mean? Let’s consider some comparisons.
While we were touring a U.S. mission, the mission president frantically said he’d just learned that one of his new missionaries had disappeared from his apartment. After an extensive search, we found the frightened missionary, about ready to return home. When we had a chance to talk, I asked what was the problem. In a nutshell, he said he had just read the Book of Mormon for the first time, had prayed about it, and received no burning feeling—so it must not be true. We talked all evening about the three main sources of spiritual truth—reason, feelings, and experience. We discovered that he knew little about the rational case for the Book of Mormon [8], he didn’t know much about the variety of feelings that can confirm truth, and he’d never considered the “test of experience,” letting the book speak for itself over an extended time. [9] Nor did he know of Joseph Smith’s teaching that only by sacrificing all earthly things can we know that we are doing the will of God. Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven.
But he couldn’t take it in, so the next day, he decided to go home—he just didn’t have a testimony strong enough to make him want to stay as a missionary. I called him a time or two after that, and we became friends. But he never finished that mission.
A few years later, a returned missionary asked me what it means that Apostles are “special witnesses of the name of Christ in all the world” [10] and that the Seventy are “especial witnesses … in all the world.” [11] “Does that mean they have seen the Savior?” he asked reverently. I replied, “Well, it might mean that. But I also like what I once heard President Harold B. Lee say: ‘I know by a witness more powerful than sight that Jesus is the Christ.’” [12] Then we talked about the witness more powerful than sight.
The witness more powerful than sight applies especially to the role of actual, demanding experiences in developing a witness that one knows the Savior. It is one thing to know about Him or even to see Him—but quite another to know Him. And that higher degree of “knowing” usually comes after complexities in life. Often it comes because of the complexity. The life story of the Apostle Paul vividly illustrates what this means.
When Paul was helping to persecute the early Christians, he was traveling on the road to Damascus when “…suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.” [13]
Paul saw Christ, or at least he saw the light in which Christ stood; and Paul heard His voice—he conversed one-on-one, aloud, with Him. But did Paul “know” Him because he saw and heard Him so directly? To the contrary, he asked, “Who art thou, Lord?” Then Paul, “trembling and astonished,” asked, “what wilt thou have me to do?” [14]
As Paul staggered to his feet, he found that he’d been struck with a blindness that would last three days. But the Lord told him how to find Ananias, who would heal him. This was the beginning of Paul’s journey of faith, but he needed to become blind in order to see. Not that one must see to believe, but one must believe in order to see. This was also just the beginning of Paul’s encounter with actual experience, for the Lord would now show Paul “how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake.” [15]
Paul was then baptized and began the missionary labors that would consume him for the rest of his life. The Lord watched over him from the moment he began to preach Christ and Him crucified: “Saul increased the more in strength.” [16] But in the years that followed, Paul would suffer, again and again, what he came to call “the afflictions of the gospel.” [17] On multiple occasions he was shipwrecked, imprisoned, and persecuted as he labored to build tiny, struggling branches of the Church all over the Mediterranean.
Paul eventually came to “glory in tribulations.” [18] He learned from his own endless exertions in the Lord’s holy cause that we can become “joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him.” Paul suffered for Him, with Him, doing His work, sacrificing for the early Saints, continually afflicted in their afflictions.
And he wasn’t grumpy about a life of so much toil. Rather, his trials and his empathy for the travails of his fellow Saints softened his heart with the mellow affection that good missionaries often feel toward Church members.
After years of living through this relentless yet somehow glorious ordeal, Paul came to Mars Hill in Athens—a gathering place that sounds like the original and ancient version of Facebook: “For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.” [19]
Paul told them he had just passed by a monument they had built to celebrate that God is unknowable—and now he wanted to give them his personal, hard-won witness of Christ, whom he now “knew.” “Ye men of Athens,” he said, “[I saw the altar you have built] with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” [20]
Paul then said that the true God of heaven and earth had “made the world and all things therein,” adding that if men and women will “seek the Lord . . . they might feel after him,” for he is “not far from every one of us.” Indeed, “we are also his offspring.” [21]
How could Paul “know” God this well now, in a way he simply didn’t and couldn’t have known Him when he saw and heard that stunning vision years earlier on the road to Damascus? He answered that question when he spoke of “Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things … That I may know him, and … the fellowship of his sufferings.” [22]
Like the handcart survivors, Paul came to know God in his extremities. Paul learned to know Him intimately through a lifetime of living in “the fellowship of his sufferings.” For “how knoweth a man the master whom he has not served … and is far from the thoughts and intents of his heart?” [23] Paul knew his Master because of what he learned from givinghis heart and his life to God. It was the witness more powerful than sight.
Sister Hafen: Like Elder Holland and Paul, who both came to know God through suffering and sacrifice, so did young Agnes Caldwell. She was nine years old in October of 1856 when she and the others in the Willie Handcart Company were slogging through wind-driven snow on the high plains of Wyoming. She was literally starving, and Rocky Ridge was still ahead. Then she tells how she was rescued:
“The infirm and the aged were allowed to ride,” she says, “all able-bodied continued to walk.” Some of the children decided they would keep up with the wagons, in hopes of being asked to ride. One by one the others dropped out until she was the last one remaining.
“After what seemed the longest run I ever made … Brother Kimball called to me, ‘Say, sissy, would you like a ride?’ I answered in my very best manner, ‘Yes, sir.’ At this he reached over, [took] my hand, [then clucked] to his horses [which made] me run, with legs that seemed to me could run no farther. On we went [for what] seemed miles … [I thought] he was the meanest man that ever lived … Just at what seemed the breaking point, he stopped. Taking a blanket, he wrapped me up and lay me in the bottom of the wagon, warm and comfortable. Here I had time to change my mind, as I surely did, knowing full well [that] … by making me run … he saved me from freezing [to death.]”
Note the symbols: Young Agnes—Giving everything she had, taking the wagon master’s hand, and holding on. The wagon master—Loving enough to lend his strength, yet wise enough to stretch her to her limits, and courageous enough to volunteer for the rescue in the first place. She didn’t have to hang onto his hand when he pressed her to give more. Yes, he saved her life, but so did she. They both had to sacrifice and give their all. A story of mercy? Yes, but in this case, not “tender mercy,” but what we might call “severe mercy.”
I’d like to share a brief example of what love and sacrifice means to Bruce and I. We were about to be married. We were in school at BYU. Bruce wanted to teach some day, and graduate school is expensive. But what about a family? Could Bruce stay in school if we started our family? Could I finish my degree? We decided we wanted to—needed to—ask Heavenly Father. We prayed. We fasted. At the end of our fast, it was clear—for us—that we should welcome a child when the Lord decided to send one. Morning sickness. What a way to announce an answer to prayer.
And that child was not easy by any stretch. He stretched us to our limits. We sacrificed every day. One night, when the child was about eight or nine (and was thankfully asleep), I remember Bruce in exasperation asking, “The Lord put Adam and Eve on the earth as full-grown people! Why couldn’t he have done that with this child?” And the thought just came to me: “That boy was given to us to make Christians out of us.”
We changed and developed as we gave day-by-day, month-by month—to teach gospel principles, to discipline with love and humor, to allow him to experience the consequences of his choices, to help him become a servant, and then a friend, and then a son to God. And of course there were many bright shining moments. But raising children well is hard!
I’d finally like to tell you about a true Christian who passed away here in Rexburg just last weekend. For decades she welcomed—and loved with good cheer—her family, her children, other family’s children (like ours), her neighbors, her ward, Ricks, and BYU-I students. We knew Betty and her children up close and personal for 40 years as our back-fence neighbors.
We just got this text from one of our boys: “I just saw that Betty passed away last night. It affects me more than I thought it would. I think we all remember the love and acceptance she showed us at a really important time of our lives. Thank you, Betty.”
And we just got this text from one of our daughters: “Thanks for letting us know about Betty. She influenced all of our lives in the direction of Jesus Christ! She had an unconditional love that pulled people to her and to our Savior.” (Charity in the finest sense.) She exemplified what we’re hoping to say today, for you and for us—what we all might hope to become.
Elder Hafen: I testify that a lifetime of experience can lead us through the winding paths of sacrifice and tribulation until we know Him, as did Elder Holland—and Betty. It is the witness more powerful than sight. As Paul wrote, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child … but when I became a man [or woman] I put away childish things. 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.” [24]
Notes
[1] “2019 Temple Open House Video - Online Version,” churchofjesuschrist.org.
[2] Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Marion D. Hanks, longtime Mormon leader, dies,” The Salt Lake Tribune, archive.sltrib.com.
[3] Jeffery R. Holland, Christ and the New Covenant, [2009].
[4] Jeffery R. Holland, Christ and the New Covenant, [2009].
[5] Ether 12:6.
[6] Doctrine and Covenants 97:8.
[7] Helaman 5:50.
[8] E.g., Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon (Oxford:2003); Tad Callister, A Case for the Book of Mormon (Deseret:2019)
[9] Bruce C. Hafen, The Believing Heart, 2nd ed. [1990], 21-37.
[10] Doctrine and Covenants 107:23.
[11] Doctrine and Covenants 107:25.
[12] Teachings of Harold B. Lee [2000], 636-637
[13] Acts 9:3-5.
[14] Acts 9:6.
[15] Acts 9:16.
[16] Acts 9:22.
[17] 2 Timothy 1:8.
[18] Romans 5:3.
[19] Acts 17:21.
[20] Acts 17:22-23.
[21] Acts 17:24, 27-28.
[22] Phillipians 3:8-10.
[23] Mosiah 5:13.
[24] 1 Corinthians 13:11-12.
About Elder Bruce C. Hafen
Bruce Hafen grew up in St. George, Utah. After serving a mission to Germany, he met Marie Kartchner from Bountiful, Utah, at Brigham Young University. They were married in 1964.
Elder Hafen received a bachelor’s degree from BYU and a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Utah. After practicing law in Salt Lake City, he joined BYU in 1971 as a member of the original faculty of BYU’s new Law School. He taught and published research on family law and constitutional law.
He served as the President of BYU–Idaho from 1978 to 1985. Elder Hafen then became Dean of the BYU Law School and later served as provost—the second in command––at BYU. He was called as a full-time General Authority in 1996, serving in area presidencies in Australia, North America, and Europe. He also served at Church headquarters as an adviser to the Priesthood Department, the general auxiliary presidencies, Church History, and the Temple Department. Elder Hafen became an Emeritus General Authority in 2010 and then served as president of the St. George Temple. More recently, he served as Chairman of the Utah LDS Corrections Committee, overseeing the Church branches in Utah’s state prisons and county jails. He is the author of several books on gospel topics, including a biography of Elder Neal A. Maxwell, and books on marriage, the temple, and the Atonement, including The Broken Heart and Covenant Hearts.
About Sister Marie K. Hafen
Marie K. Hafen is a homemaker and teacher. She has a master’s degree in English from BYU and has taught Shakespeare, freshman writing, and Book of Mormon at BYU–Idaho, the University of Utah, and BYU. She was also on the Young Women General Board, the Board of Directors of the Deseret News, and was matron of the St. George Temple. She has edited and co-authored books with her husband, including The Contrite Spirit and, most recently, Faith Is Not Blind.
The Hafens have seven children and 46 grandchildren.