The following is a letter my husband wrote to one of our spiritual God-nephews. It is a response to the latter's query regarding the responsibility of a husband to provide for his wife and children.
Dear Prabhu,
Pranams. Jaya Srila Prabhupada. Hare Krishna.
As we all know, grhastha ashram means man has responsibility to provide the wife and children with shelter, clothes, food, etc., along with guiding them in Krishna consciousness. Srila Prabhupada has stated, "woman is meant for homely comforts and man is meant for working hard." In my case, I joined ISKCON in 1973 and served in the temple as a brahmacari for the first seven years, and then opened a temple and got married. For eight years Phalini devi and I served together preaching, distributing books and building the temple congregation. During that time we had our two children.
In the final year, 1988, I began doing some outside business to earn extra Lakshmi for the family and then turned the management of the temple over to an ISKCON grhastha couple. We then moved to a rural ISKCON community. There I built a house for my wife and children and engaged in various businesses to fully support them. After 2005 when Kamalini got married and Nitai Pran moved out to live with some devotee friends, Phalini devi and I started to visit Poland, do some kirtan and preaching there, and a few years later began visiting India. We slowly made a transition from earning money in business to full time traveling and preaching here in India.
By Krishna's grace we earned enough Lakshmi in our business to be able to support ourselves here in India (you have seen our simple flat) and also travel back and forth between India and USA from time to time to visit our children and grandchildren.
What Phalini devi and I have done is somewhat common among serious devotees in ISKCON. If you look at the ISKCON Salem community, for instance, you will see that Gaura Bhagavan Prabhu, Vrindavananatha Prabhu, Sundararajana Prabhu, and so many other grhasthas there have worked and earned Lakshmi for quite a number of years while supporting their wives and children in Krishna consciousness and taking part in temple functions. More recently many of them have now retired from money-making and are serving full time on the temple project and in local preaching activities. From what I can see, these devotee families in Salem are nicely situated and enthusiastically pushing forward our preaching mission.
I can tell you that Phalini devi is feeling quite secure financially as there are sufficient funds that she can live on if I leave the body before she does. We gave eleven lakhs in charity (about $18,000 US) this past year for various preaching projects here in India, mostly temple construction and some book publishing, simply by interest income on our fixed deposits here in India which came from our business profits. Also, we have been able to give our children some Lakshmi each year to help them along financially, by Krishna's grace.
Each of us has to decide how to carry forward the mission of spreading Lord Caitanya's sankirtana movement and simultaneously support our wife and children along the way. I can understand your wife's concerns and I hope the two of you can thoughtfully envision the best way forward. Feel free to share with me any additional thoughts you would like to discuss further.
Wishing you and your family all the best. Haribol
param vijayate sri krishna sankirtanam
Yours in the service of Srila Prabhupada,
Haripada dasa
P.S. "We should correctly see all things as emanations of the Absolute Truth." SB 11.10.11
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