Ambroise d'Optina
1812-1891 19th century Feast day: October 23
Short advice, given from a bed, that sets a life upright again.
Who was Ambroise d'Optina?
A sacristan's son and a brilliant seminarian, he had promised to become a monk if he recovered from an illness, and took four years to keep his word. Ill all his life and usually lying down, he spent some thirty years in his cell at Optina receiving dozens of people a day (peasant women, merchants, students, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) and answering them in very short sentences, often in village rhyme.
In their own words
Live without fretting, judge no one, be a nuisance to no one, and my respects to all.
Where things are simple there are a hundred angels; where things are complicated, not one.