There is a nice parallel between one of the founding postulates of Protestantism, according to which the grace of God alone saves the soul of Man, the humility advocated by the greatest saints of Catholicism, and the affirmation so often repeated in the Koran of the great freedom of God (“God does what He Wills”).
From this freedom of God, springs sincere faith and the great freedom of Man.
It is in reality a masterful way out. It allows us to leave with a joyful and liberating leap all the logic of bargaining, however respectable it may be, which characterizes an archaic relationship with the divine (an immature, commercial, compensatory spirituality…).
These two movements (the locking up in the accounting logic and the negotiation – I do this in order to get this), your liberation, the exit from this logic, are present in all traditions, all religions. I am thinking here of the merits that we accumulate in Theravada Buddhism: the positioning determines well beyond a discourse held on grace.
It is also about our relationship with rituals. These can be accomplished in a sacrificial – transactional- logic. The sacrificial approach for example (“buying peace, salvation, attention, the love of God, appeasing wrath…)
The entire compensatory logic lies behind this commercial reality. The notion of redemption, of legitimacy to be reconquered, of atonement… …Or in a great flexibility, a great freedom, as we connect the manifested and unmanifested worlds, casually.
No tradition is exempt from the presence of these two polarities.. In Zen, although such a generous example of freedom, the ritual can be a real prison of the mind where the practitioner locks himself in a logic of redeeming himself in his own eyes and enters into an obsessional dead-end.
After the ritual, we can of course apply this same distinction to prayer, in tune with transactional logic and deploy in great freedom throughout the space offered by God onto a broad and mature spirituality.
Notes & Silence 
💛
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In at least some forms of protestantism, the idea of saving faith can become a form of self satisfied abdication or responsibility.
It’s a tradition that makes a ritual out of denying ritual.
In this, I find my issue with organised religion. It humbly ignores its own superiority complex in its inherent dishonesty.
Pardon my cynicism.
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