Krishna Protects His Devotees

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No matter where or when in the world we live, our spiritual life will benefit from eagerness to understand how a devotee, on the way back to Krşņa, traverses crisis.

Giving ear to the Ukrainian devotees' struggles with acute hardship and danger can help us all. Their current ordeal, certainly tragic, offers us a vital learning experience in the spirituality of calamity.

Blessed over the years with one of the most successful yatras in ISKCON history, the Ukrainian brand of bhakti has long awed the international Vaisnava community. Just ask any visitors from abroad who have attended the enormous festivals, witnessed the sacrificial devotional service, and studied the dedication to devotee care.

Now, as the Ukrainian devotees valiantly struggle through mass adversity, we can help them as well as ourselves by carefully studying their hopes, their cries, and their prayers.

Five months after all hell broke loose, the United Nations estimates that at least twelve million Ukrainians have fled their homes.

More than five million have left for neighboring countries, while seven million people are estimated to be displaced inside Ukraine itself.

Creating Europe's greatest refugee crisis since World War II, ninety percent of the dislodged Ukrainians are women and children. Millions of families, regardless of the military outcome, will need long-term support to cope with the violence they have endured and to heal from it.

This publication is primarily a compilation of talks given shortly after the military conflict broke out in February 2022, affecting the lives of many devotees in the areas of Ukraine and Donbas. The main attempt in producing this is to offer some spiritual support and answers to those who may be looking for it.

For those readers who are not from the Ukraine or Donbas areas, Chapter One provides some contextual information about these devotee communities and the garden of bhakti that has flourished for the whole world to see.

As a result of the military conflict, many devotees have been isolated in their homes, either completely alone or with their family members, and have not been able to engage in their usual daily activities. Many other devotees have been displaced and have moved to areas that they consider to be safer. The lives of the devotees who are at home, as well as those who have gone to another place, have been dramatically changed by the circumstances.

Knowing that some devotees still had access to the Internet through their phones or computers and were eager to hear something that is relevant to support them spiritually in this situation, I wanted to speak to these devotees and answer questions that were most relevant to them from a spiritual perspective, based on answers that Śrīla Prabhupāda and our previous ācāryas have given directly related to these questions.