About six months ago I began thoroughly contemplating the concept of prayer. Is prayer beneficial? Is prayer efficacious? Does prayer even matter? Can God even hear me?

As a confessing protestant Christian this quickly became a real, daily struggle. Prayer, for the Christian, is a significant and necessary part of life. In fact, to some Christians prayer is nearly life itself. Paul, who wrote large amounts of the biblical New Testament, even says somewhere to “pray without ceasing.” But how can one pray so incessantly, if prayer seems dissipating?

Though, as I have realized, prayer is indeed necessary and a very beneficial action. However, the reader should quickly understand that mysteries need investigation, and questions need intentionality. When we have a question or doubt we need to work through it. Brokenness does not fix itself.

In order to be solved, a mystery necessitates a detective. In order to be answered, a question necessitates one seeking an answer. I like to pair this thought with the image of Sherlock Holmes as presented by the BBC. A man who analyzes everything and synthesizes all his information to give meaning to what was seemingly meaningless, disjointed facts only moments before.

Much of life is just like that -- meaningless. Until one gathers what one has and offers some rays of meaning. In order for me to give meaning to what had become meaningless -- prayer -- a long, intentional and still constant search for a suitable answer has emerged. That is the first step, taking up the challenge. The next step is paying attention.

At first, I read a couple of books on prayer by E.M. Bounds. I thought my search had made some headway. In his pamphlet, “Power Through Prayer,” Bounds gave me some fresh perspective and some radical encouragement to pray, but he was missing something pivotal that I was asking: “Why?” Why pray, indeed.

But when I, or anyone, asks why, there are numerous assumptions in trying to give an answer. My assumption in asking why, was the thought that maybe there was no why to be given. I was thinking maybe prayer is not beneficial, perhaps prayer is not effective? What I was really asking though was, Maybe prayer is not beneficial. In giving me what I want, perhaps prayer is not effective. In changing reality to what I want it to be. Those are two very different questions.

I was assuming that praying was equivalent to asking God for divine intervention. I mean isn’t that how we pray today: for people to be healed, for sicknesses to vanish, for safety, for world peace and the like? When in reality, praying might be something much more similar to being prompted toward human intervention.

So what do some prominent Christian thinkers say? Karl Barth, in discussing civil association (government) says, “ [t]he Christian community prays for the civil community. It does so all the more since the civil community as such is not in the habit of praying. But by praying for it, it also makes itself responsible for it before God, and it would not be taking this responsibility seriously if it did no more than pray, if it did not also work actively on behalf of the civil community.”

Gustavo Guitérrez, the pioneer of liberation theology along a very similar but different line of thought is summarized by Roberto Goizueta, as saying, “All human praxis become at bottom, an act of worship, an act of prayer…and every act of prayer becomes a sociopolitical act.”

So Guitérrez leads us to an act of prayer. Prayer, in itself, is an action but this leads to prayer itself becoming the action by which we respond to a given situation. Prayer is practical, and by extension prayer is praxis.

I was assuming that Theology and Christianity are only an ideology, are only a belief, but they are so much more. My paradigm needed shattering. Prayer is a Christian action of love. As a result, the Christian’s love is a response to God’s love, a way of living -- a way of existing; in Guitérrez’s and Barth’s paradigm, theology becomes as much a verb as it remains a noun, yet distinctively inseparable. Christianity and theology are a way of existing in the world. We are supposed to let these beliefs shape how we think as much as we are meant to let these thoughts form how we act.