The late Patricia Holland didn’t have a favorite scripture, says her daughter, Mary Alice Holland McCann. But the scripture that the three Holland children heard their mother reference the most was Doctrine and Covenants 88:67:
“And if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you; and that body which is filled with light comprehendeth all things.”
“Keep your eye single to the glory of God,” Mary Alice always heard her mother say.
“It was like the background noise in our heads,” Mary Alice tells LDS Living. “She referenced it to guide us, comfort us, and reassure us. It was the drumbeat of her motherhood.”
And that drumbeat still sounds loud and strong in Mary Alice’s life today, influencing her daily choices and helping to calm her worries. She no doubt felt its rhythm while compiling An Eye Single, a new book home to selections of her mother’s vast writings and teachings.
Reading An Eye Single feels like sitting next to Sister Holland at home by a crackling fire and taking in the warmth of her testimony and wisdom. A feeling Mary Alice knows better than most and hopes to share with all.
How Sister Holland Led Her Children to Christ
Sister Holland would use “any opportunity she could” to point her children to the glory of God. For example, Mary Alice remembers coming home in tears from junior high one day, having received an unkind note from a friend.
“Mom sat and talked with me and listened to the situation. She tried to make me feel better and suggested what I could do, and I did feel better. And then she said, ‘The One who can really help you the most is Heavenly Father. So why don’t you pray and ask for His help?’” Mary Alice says. “She didn’t just say it—she would literally walk us through how to turn to prayer.”
Mary Alice can still see it clearly in her head: she and her mother knelt in the family room where they lived in the president’s home atBrigham Young University. The carpet was brown, the couch was white, and Sister Holland held the family dog in her lap. Mary Alice prayed out loud for help with her friend.
“Turning to Heavenly Father became a natural pattern for me,” Mary Alice says, adding that her parents repeatedly showed her that they would always love her and help her as much as they could but that Heavenly Father gives the most valuable help in life.
She has leaned on that teaching in her own mothering.
“As mothers or sisters or friends, this knowledge that Heavenly Father can help those we love more than we can should give us some relief: we don’t have to have all the answers. We don’t have to know all the right things to say. We love and do our best and then direct them to the source of all truth and all wisdom,” Mary Alice says. “I will be worrying about a child or grandchild, and in the back of my head, I’ll think, ‘Keep your eye single to the glory of God.’ It helps put the worry to rest.”
The phrase also helped Mary Alice through one of the greatest unexpected difficulties she’s yet to face: her mother’s unexpected death.
When Mary Alice Needed Reassurance
Sister Patricia Holland died on July 20, 2023, after a brief hospitalization.
“The shock of it was so unbearable,” Mary Alice says. “In my mind, she was not supposed to die.”
Mary Alice had been more worried about her father, President Jeffrey R. Holland. He’d been battling a kidney issue for a couple of years while Sister Holland was relatively healthy. Mary Alice had been preparing herself for the eventuality of her father’s death, including thinking about how her mother would then come live closer to her. So when Sister Holland was suddenly admitted to the intensive care unit and it became clear she wasn’t going to live, Mary Alice was distraught.
“I went to the bathroom in the hospital and was pleading and praying—begging—for her life and telling Heavenly Father how she wasn’t supposed to die,” Mary Alice recalls. And there, on her knees on the bathroom floor, Mary Alice found solace in the relationship with God she’d been nurturing since she was a junior high student worrying about friends.
“I felt the peace we learn of in Philippians, the peace that ‘passeth all understanding.’ I felt a peace I shouldn’t have felt,” Mary Alice says (see Philippians 4:7). “I knew it was Heavenly Father telling me that even though this wasn’t what I planned, everything would be OK. I felt the power of the Savior in my life, reassuring me in the way my mother always taught me He would.”
Sharing Her Mother
As she grieved her mother’s death, Mary Alice began working on a very special project: sharing her mother’s faith with the world.
“I got my hands on every single thing she’d ever written or said. I worked with my dad’s secretary to get a lot of things that haven’t been published before, like talks she gave on mission tours and general conference training sessions. I went through everything and pulled out what I wanted my kids to hear,” she says.
Those carefully selected quotations are now in a beautiful book aptly named An Eye Single. Now that the book is in Mary Alice’s hands, she says there is a quote she repeatedly turns to from her mother’s talkat BYU Women’s Conference in 1994:
“My happiest thoughts and my highest hopes are to someday, somewhere on some small green and grassy piece of God’s celestial realm, sit with my children and grandchildren, crowded around me for as far as the eye can see, and tell them of the love I feel and speak of eternal things. I long for that sense of family and home, and it is the most motivating force in my life. I wanted it in our early married life, I want it now, and I want it in the world to come.”
“I like to think of her sitting there now,” Mary Alice says. “Waiting for the rest of us, waiting for her children and grandchildren to come and surround her and hear all that she’s learned of eternal things.”
An Eye Single
This compilation of thoughts and teachings, carefully selected by her daughter, Mary Alice, shares essential truths that Sister Holland came to know for herself over a lifetime of study and faith. These passages will provide perspective and light as you nourish your own testimony and will enhance gospel discussions in any setting.
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