The great Anglo-Catholic writer Evelyn Underhill once wisely noted that “The character of worship is always decided by the worshiper’s conception of God.” This simple statement, that how we pray is always contingent upon the kind of being we think we are praying to, is enormously suggestive as to why God as a living and inspiring entity is not always apparent to many.

If we were to form a picture of God from the words we say in the Rosh Hashana prayers, for example, we might reach an uneasy conclusion, that God resembles a somewhat demanding parent, who remembers us but only in order to pronounce judgment on our mistake filled past. The liturgy is replete with descriptions of God as a king, casting a critical eye on humans and other species. Such imagery could produce a feeling of reverence and a desire to please, but it could just as easily backfire, if our association is of yet another force in our lives that is less than fully supportive and watching us like a hawk.

Do you think God is judgmental? Nurturing? Punitive? Awe inspiring? Remote? Close at hand? Interested in you? A fighter for justice? Aware? Long gone?

Or do you not think about this at all? Is God like a distant volcano that we have heard about – imposing, inaccessible, somewhat brooding but capable of eruption? Or just a complete epistemological blank, like a leprechaun but not as charming? Or simply a word, three random letters in English, four in French and German, of several lengths in Hebrew?

In the opening to A Brief History of Time, Steven Hawking conveys an anecdote about a lecture on astronomy given by a well-known scientist (or perhaps, says Hawking, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell):

“The scientist described how ‘the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.’ At the end of the lecture a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘what is the tortoise standing on?’

‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ’But it’s turtles all the way down.’

For many of my students, especially those not wedded to any particular religious ideology, in a best case scenario, God is the turtle theory as presented by a little old lady – quaint, charming, harmless, a tad loony, a relic of pre-scientific knowledge. Not that they would assert outright atheism or anything as strident as that. Indeed, many would profess to believing in God without that belief having much if any consequence in their lives in any practical way. No need to attack God when the divine can simply be absorbed, meekly assigned one of the stalls near the end of the row of the multicultural flea market.

My impressionistic observations about student relationships to and feelings about God, religion and morality were somewhat confirmed in research done by Christian Smith, a sociologist currently working at Notre Dame. Professor Smith paints a picture of the spiritual lives of contemporary American teenagers that is informed by certain essential tenets: 1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. 2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. 3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem. 5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Smith’s work conveys that for many young people today (and their parents), religion or spirituality or whatever you like, is simply about being a “good person”, that is, being “nice, kind, pleasant, respectful, and responsible; working on self-improvement; taking care of one’s health; and doing one’s best to be successful.”

What it is not about is some kind of theological rigidity or specified set of practices. God can be called upon when you have a need or problem, but otherwise, hangs back and does not intervene or present a set of demands. Less an imposing deity, more a good psychologist. As Smith notes, this kind of belief system is “about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents. This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one’s prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering…Rather, what appears to be the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people.”

A king who judges, a therapist who soothes. Somehow, neither of these depictions seems quite right when it comes to forging a relationship with the Ineffable.

Judaism offers another alternative, and presents a God who is neither judge nor jury nor friend nor shrink. Despite the paradox of creating a personal relationship with a non-personal God, the covenant established between God and human beings suggest God as a partner, one who is the ground of the universe, and yet will unassumingly bend to human needs, passions and vulnerabilities.

God is ever mindful of his covenant,” we read in the Rosh Hashana Mussaf prayer. Along with trembling images of divine power and surveillance comes this reminder of a fundamental Jewish perspective – ultimately God has entered into a collaboration with creation, and that covenant cannot be broken.

In an age of great uncertainty and greater anxiety, perhaps the God we need is not to be found above in the heavens nor across from us in the therapist’s chair, but beside us as a partner in trying to salvage meaning from the chaos.

No doubt this is often so hard to imagine or internalize. But as Abraham Joshua Heschel powerfully argued, ““Usually we regard as meaningful that which can be expressed, and as meaningless that which cannot be expressed. Yet, the equation of the meaningful and the expressible ignores a vast realm of human experience.”

Though we may not feel it or see it, we are not alone.