We say freedom on the fifteenth of August and mostly mean permission
It is August, so there will be flags in school assemblies and Anil Kant's "Pray for India" in churches, and a good number of us will watch the Red Fort telecast at home. Sixty-five years of it this month. The generation that won it gave up a great deal, and I am not going to be clever about that.
The question is what we did with it afterwards.
Last month in Guwahati a teenage girl was surrounded outside a bar by a crowd of around thirty men, filmed while it happened, and left there. This year a newborn in Punjab was taken off an incubator in a government hospital because the family could not produce two hundred rupees. Neither of those is a failure of law. India has plenty of law. Both are failures of what a person thinks he is allowed to do when nobody who matters is watching.
Freedom is not the problem
The usual response from a pulpit at this point is that we have too much freedom and need more rules. Paul goes somewhere else with it, and he is writing to people who had just been told the same thing.
For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.
He does not withdraw the liberty. He never once suggests the answer to its misuse is less of it. He tells them what it was given for. Freedom that turns into serving people is the thing working properly. Freedom that turns into helping yourself is the thing being wasted, and the cure is not a smaller allowance.
Paul does not withdraw the liberty. He tells them what it was given for.
On Galatians 5
The verse everybody quotes in August
You will hear this one from most Indian pulpits this month, usually as a formula. Do four things and God will fix the country.
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
Read it as a transaction and it becomes a machine for guilt, because the nation stays broken and you conclude somebody did not pray hard enough. Read who is speaking and it changes. God offers this before anybody asks. The humbling in that verse is not effort, it is agreement. It is a people stopping the pretence that they can manage without him.
Which is the opposite of trying harder. You cannot strain your way into humility.
So what do we actually do
Pray for the country, and expect it to be answered rather than filed. Then look at the two hundred rupees. Somebody in that hospital corridor could have paid it and did not, and the reason was not a shortage of money in Punjab.
A nation is not healed by a national event. It is healed in corridors like that one, by people who have been so thoroughly convinced of God's goodness toward them that it starts leaking onto whoever is standing nearby. That is what the Spirit does in a person. It is not a campaign.
Sing the song this month. Then go and be free in the way Paul meant.
Premasis Satman
Founder and Executive Director of 5Talents Magazine, writing from Hyderabad. He has written the magazine's editorial column since the first issue in July 2012.
India · Independence day · Grace · Editorial · Point of view