Глава XII. Заключение

Lord, in Your light we will see light! (Great Doxology) We have finished our story about the life, high deeds and grace-filled gifts of Father Fr. Ambrose. Taking a final, general look at his entire extraordinary, holy, ascetic life, we see that the most characteristic feature of his spiritual appearance was the active, saving love that animated him. He was not an indifferent spectator of human sorrows, he warmly responded to them, accepted them into his wide heart and, with his God-enlightened mind, sought means to heal them. There are different sorrows of people - there are material sorrows: need, bodily illnesses; there are spiritual sorrows: the torment of the soul from the consciousness of its depravity, its inability to live, misunderstanding of the meaning of life, spiritual confusion. There are people, especially many of them among educated youth, who are not indifferent to the grief of their neighbors, but who do not see beyond material grief, the grief of poverty. They are ready to selflessly go to the aid of a suffering neighbor, but to help of an exclusively external nature: to relieve them of material need, to change the external conditions of existence. This is not true, all-encompassing Christian love. She also sympathizes with external grief, but she sees and feels incomparably deeper; it penetrates into the very soul of a person and there sees its fundamental suffering; that suffering that cannot be cured by external measures, but requires the spiritual influence of sincere, regenerating, saving love in the name of God. And oh. Ambrose possessed this gift to the highest degree. As we have seen, he also alleviated material human grief by external means, but at the same time he embraced the whole soul of a person with his loving feeling, knew how to comprehend its innermost spiritual grief and pour out the healing oil of his compassionate care and affection onto it, raising it to Heaven, to God. That is why people who came to him with a broken soul and, it seemed, dead forever, left him resurrected, revived, joyful, saved, believers. We have seen on the pages of biography many examples of such spiritual rebirth. And we are unlikely to be mistaken if we say that the significant majority of the nuns of Shamordin and many of the inhabitants of Optina owe the beginning of their spiritual life to the saving love of Elder Ambrose. Russian society understood this feature of the spiritual appearance of Elder Ambrose. It realized that this man was neither a stern hermit monk, nor a harsh denouncer of human shortcomings and infirmities, nor an abstract theologian; he was living love itself, able to come into close proximity with every grieving and burdened soul, to take upon itself its weaknesses and sorrows, to warm, comfort and call it to a new, vigorous, pure and joyful life. And that is why he became a spiritual center that attracted not only common people, who strove for him as a man of God, a man of a holy, God-pleasing life, but also educated people, who looked for in him a teacher of life, who showed the way to the true happiness of the soul, who taught to know and love God. Father Ambrose resolved for Russian society its long-standing and so difficult to resolve question of what to do, how to live, why to live; he also resolved another fatal issue for Russian society: the merger of the educated classes with the common people. He told Russian society that the meaning of life lies in love, but not in that humanistic, irreligious love that some part of our intelligentsia proclaims and which is expressed in measures of external correction of life, but in that true, deep, Christian love that embraces the whole soul of its neighbor and heals its deepest and most painful ulcers with its life-giving power. Father Ambrose also resolved the issue of merging the intelligentsia with the people, uniting them in his cell in one common feeling of repentant faith in God. Thus, Fr. Ambrose showed Russian society a single saving path of life, showed it the true and lasting foundation of its well-being, firstly, spiritual, and then, as a consequence, material. The question now is, on what soil has this wondrous teacher of the life of our time risen? He grew up on the basis of Orthodoxy, he was raised by the Orthodox Church. And I can’t help but want to repeat once again what we said in the preface. No matter what the enemies of the Church, the enemies of Orthodoxy say, no matter how much they revile this national shrine, the Orthodox Church and, in particular, our Russian Church, by the grace of God, have not yet become impoverished! This grace still operates in her, and still brings forth great lamps of faith and piety for our admonition, for our consolation. We recognize this significant and joyful fact not with a sense of pride and vanity, not for empty boasting of our righteous people, but for the humble thanksgiving of the Lord, who has mercy on us and saves us, we recognize it in order to even more appreciate and love our Holy Orthodox Church with all its saving structure; to strengthen ourselves in sincere, childlike and rationally-conscious obedience to her, so as not to fear or fear anything so much as a conscious or unconscious falling away from her, from her age-old ways and covenants! By his high example, Fr. Ambrose clearly shows us that only in the Church of Christ is the fullness of true Christian perfection achieved, there is a direct and true path to eternal salvation, and therefore whoever wants to improve and grow in Christ, who wants to achieve eternal life, there is no other path except that indicated by the Church of Christ, the bearer of eternal truth and grace. At the same time, we wish that the spirit of humble faith, holy simplicity and sincere brotherly love, with which Elder Ambrose, like his great mentors, was imbued, does not become scarce, but, on the contrary, burns brightly in our holy monasteries, including in the Optina Hermitage, and in the Kazan Ambrose Monastery, so that they, imbued with this spirit, would be strong, indestructible spiritual support for the Russian people, restless in the waves of everyday worries, and would give them, according to the behest of Elder Ambrose, spiritual enlightenment, encouragement and consolation every time they, exhausted by life, come with their devastated and broken souls under their holy and gracious shelter to seek spiritual help and inner peace! In this, precisely in this, lies the high, vital significance of our holy abodes. Removed from the world, they serve the world in that, preserving within themselves the image of Christ and the truth of Christ, they reveal them, when necessary, to a world that has lost its way and has moved away from Christ! Monasteries have always been the center of spiritual life and Christian growth of the Russian people; Let us hope that they will remain so in the future, observing, together with the entire Orthodox Russian Church, the Christian truth in all its purity, without admixtures of human inventions and human extravagance, in all the inviolability of the apostolic and patristic tradition, as a most precious treasure received from ancient years by the Russian people for careful storage and transmission to subsequent generations. May the wise and loving Optina elder Hieroschemamonk Ambrose, who showed us a living example of high Christian life and warmed the hearts of so many with his fatherly love, have an eternal and grateful memory among the Russian people! 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