Forget Oneself and Love Others

In Tolstoy’s Anne Karenina, the young woman named Kitty goes into a sort of depression after the man she thought wanted to marry her abandoned her for someone else. Eventually her desperate parents took her to a town in Germany to try to recover, and there she became acquainted with another young lady named Varenka. As Kitty got to know Varenka, she was amazed at her selflessness as she went about in an unassuming way helping others. She learned that Varenka did not have living parents but had been raised by another lady to whom Varenka was devoted. Varenka went about taking care of the sick, and the text describes her this way: “Varenka, alone in the world, without friends or relations, with a melancholy disappointment in the past, desiring nothing, regretting nothing, was just that perfection of which Kitty dared hardly dream. In Varenka she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble. And that was what Kitty longed to be. Seeing now clearly what was the most important, Kitty was not satisfied with being enthusiastic over it; she at once gave herself up with her whole soul to the new life that was opening to her.” Kitty learned what she needed to do to get out of her own depression and find the joy in life she was seeking: “to forget oneself and love others.” And it is surely an apt description of what the Savior did in mortality: He forgot Himself and loved others. And He invited us to do likewise: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?” (Luke 9:23-25) For us to deny ourselves is surely to stop focusing on our own happiness, and to lose our life for His sake is to seek to truly love others. Kitty saw in Varenka what this kind of life looked like, and sought to have that for herself. She determined to “seek out those who were in trouble, wherever she might be living, help them as far as she could, give them the Gospel, read the Gospel to the sick, to criminals, to the dying.”

                As I thought about this, I was reminded of C.S. Lewis’s description of what true humility looks like. He wrote in Mere Christianity, “Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all” (Book 3, Chapter 8). That is an excellent description of what it means to forget oneself and to love others and it fits well Tolstoy’s depiction of Varenka. Real humility leads us to be more interested in those around us than ourselves so that we listen more than we talk; we are more concerned about understanding and helping others than proving our merits to them. This is the kind of humility that leads to the joy that Mormon described in writing about the sons of Mosiah: “Now was not this exceeding joy? Behold, this is joy which none receiveth save it be the truly penitent and humble seeker of happiness” (Alma 27:18). I think what he meant by that last phrase was not that they sought their own happiness; rather, they sought for the happiness of others (the Lamanites) because “they could not bear that any human soul should perish; yea, even the very thoughts that any soul should endure endless torment did cause them to quake and tremble” (Mosiah 28:3). And in so doing they found a joy that can only be found one strives to “forget oneself and love others.”