Глава III. Юные годы о. Амвросия в доме и в школе

Of such is the kingdom of God (Mark 10:14) Father Ambrose, in the world Alexander Mikhailovich Grenkov, was the son of the sexton of the village of Bolshaya Lipovitsa, Tambov province, Mikhail Feodorovich and his wife Marfa Nikolaevna, who had a large family and lived in the house of their father, the priest of the same village and dean Feodor Yegorovich. November 23, 1812 in the house of Fr. Theodore, on the occasion of some family celebration, there was a large gathering of guests. And so, on this very day, Alexander Mikhailovich was born. Talking about this later, Fr. Ambrose liked to joke: “I was born in public, and I live in public.” The elder's parents were deeply pious people. He later spoke about his mother Marfa Nikolaevna like this: “She lived piously, saved herself in her own way.” The structure of family life, according to the custom of the clergy of that time, was simple, strict, Church Orthodox. Little information has been preserved about the early childhood of Alexander Mikhailovich. He grew up as a lively, cheerful, playful, restless boy. For example, his mother will force him to rock his younger brother’s cradle, and he will be bored. So he will wait a minute until his mother leaves the room, jumps out the window and runs off to play with his friends. Sasha loved friends, horses, pigeons, rural freedom, and loved to tinker with his brothers and sisters. His playfulness and restlessness, however, did not please the strict elder members of the family, and he repeatedly had to listen to reproaches from both his mother and grandmother, and his grandfather sometimes tore him by his cowlick. It seemed to Sasha that his family didn’t love him, he was jealous of his brothers and sisters, but he was wrong: they loved him, they just kept him stricter than others. The strict way of life of the priestly house of the old days was undoubtedly useful for the living boy - it moderated his playful impulses and imprinted in his soul the consciousness of the importance and seriousness of life. When Sasha grew up, after praying to God, they began to teach him to read and write. They taught, as was customary, according to the Church Slavonic primer, the Book of Hours and the Psalter, and the inspired songs of King David, from a very early age, began to resonate and sink into the heart of the future great elder. Every holiday, and even more often, his father took Sasha with him to the church of God, and he soon learned to sing and read in the choir there. The time has come to send Sasha to school. The boy's schooling began relatively late. He was already 12 years old when he was taken to the 1st grade of the Tambov Theological School. His older brother was already studying there at that time, to whom the school authorities gave the surname “Grenkov”. This surname also became established for Sasha. Poor, harsh, unsightly was the old bursa! But this did not prevent Sasha from maintaining his natural cheerfulness and liveliness of character here, and studying with great success. The dark sides of the life of the student, the sad spectacle of poverty and downtroddenness of many comrades and their parents only further kindled in the boy his natural feeling of compassion and pity for all those who grieve and are burdened! He himself knew how to appreciate the affection shown to him, which, in all likelihood, was rare in the school of that time. “When I was a boy,” he later said about himself, “we had a common tailor. I was tall, and he kept calling me Sasha; I didn’t call my other comrades so affectionately; I admit, it really touched me.” This apparently unimportant incident says a lot about the boy’s sensitive heart, which longed for affection and love, and about his ability, already in these childhood years, to inspire love from those around him. Sasha was also loved by his comrades for his cheerfulness and kindness. On the holidays of the Nativity of Christ and Easter, Sasha and his older brother came home to their native village, where their other brother, who was already a clerk, rode them around the village on horseback and provided them with other simple rural entertainment. Being the son of a poor clerk with a large family, Sasha enjoyed a semi-government allowance at the school. He studied so well that out of 148 of his classmates, he graduated from the theological school course first on the list. At the age of 18, Alexander Grenkov entered the Tambov Theological Seminary. And here he studied very well thanks to his excellent abilities. His seminary comrade said: “It used to be that you would buy a candle with your last pennies and repeat and repeat the given lessons; He doesn’t study much, but when he comes to class he will answer the teacher, as written, better than anyone else!” And at the seminary, Grenkov was always the soul of the comradely circle. But, loving society, being a cheerful, cheerful and witty young man, he always retained moral purity and modesty, inner strictness of spirit and a deep, sincere religious feeling, which, perhaps, especially attracted the hearts of everyone to him. Already an old man, he vividly recalled and interestingly related many incidents from his seminary life, and aptly characterized some of his rectors and mentors. By the way, Fr. Ambrose also talked about how he tried to write poetry while in seminary. “I confess to you,” he said, “I tried to write poetry once, believing that it was easy. I chose a good place where there were valleys and mountains, and settled down to write there. I sat for a long, long time and thought about what and how to write, but I never wrote anything. This is similar to how they told me about one Lavra monk, about whom the academicians probably wrote that he, also trying to write poetry, wrote like this: The monk Hesychius wrote these poems. Having not become a poet, he, however, being already an old man, liked from time to time to speak instructions to his listeners in rhyme, so that, in all likelihood, the crude truth in his mouth would not seem so heavy to proud hearts and, dissolved in a joke and a coherent form, would be more readily perceived by them and remembered more firmly. You might be interested in: