The Way of the Source

Author: JD Merrill

  • Does God Need Blood?

    Yesterday was Good Friday and that has me thinking a lot about Jesus, his life, his movement, his death, and his resurrection. And I think it’s important that we talk about this, because how we present “God” to humanity is important. And that starts with our understanding.

    For centuries, Christians have wrestled with a haunting question: Why did Jesus have to die?
    The answers, depending on who you ask, can vary wildly. But one of the most dominant explanations — especially in American churches — is something called Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA).

    This is the idea that Jesus died in our place, taking the punishment (penal) we deserved for our sins, satisfying God’s wrath so that we could be forgiven. In short, God needed blood — Jesus’ blood — to satisfy divine justice and cool His wrath.

    It’s a theory so embedded in the modern Christian imagination that many assume it’s the only explanation. Even further, most Christians believe that you have to believe this to even be saved or to call yourself a Christian. From Sunday sermons to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (or as I like to call it, Beating Up Jesus: The Movie), the narrative is relentless: humanity is sinful, God is angry, and Jesus took the beating we deserved. Roll credits.

    But there’s a glaring flaw to this theory… Jesus never said that. What if that’s not the story that Jesus came to tell?

    Let’s peel this back and start at the beginning.

    Photo by Alem Sánchez on Pexels.com

    What is Atonement Theory, Anyway?

    The word atonement literally means “at-one-ment” — the process of reconciling humanity back to right relationship with God.
    The earliest followers of Jesus, trying to make sense of his death and resurrection, developed different explanations for how this reconciliation might work.

    Here’s a quick breakdown of the most common theories:

    • Ransom Theory — Jesus pays a ransom to free humanity from Satan’s grip. Big in the early church.
    • Christus Victor — Jesus defeats the powers of sin, death, and evil.
    • Moral Influence Theory — Jesus’ life and death inspire radical love and compassion.
    • Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) — Jesus takes our punishment, satisfying God’s supposed need for justice.

    PSA, which is what I’ll call it for the rest of this post, didn’t actually become mainstream until the Reformation (thanks, John Calvin), but today it’s everywhere — especially in American evangelicalism. It’s preached so often and so passionately that questioning it can feel like questioning the Gospel itself.

    But maybe the problem isn’t the questioning.
    Maybe the problem is how we’ve been taught to see God in the first place.

    The Problem with PSA: God or a Bloodthirsty Warlord?

    Let’s just be blunt: PSA turns God into a cosmic child abuser — a Father so bound by legalism that He has no choice but to kill His Son to forgive the rest of His creation.

    Imagine telling a hurting, broken person that God loves them unconditionally… but also required someone to die a brutal death to make that love possible.

    It’s no wonder so many walk away from church when they realize how twisted this sounds. Especially when they realize that the type of “unconditional love” that this belief comes with… seems to have lots of conditions, rules, and expectations.

    If God is truly love — the kind of love Jesus taught us to embody — then He shouldn’t require violence to offer forgiveness.
    We are the ones who demand violence.
    Empires demand violence.
    Religions demand sacrifices.
    God doesn’t.

    The crucifixion wasn’t about satisfying God’s wrath.
    It was the inevitable outcome of what happens when you confront the violent systems of the world with radical love and truth that renders external power systems as useless.

    Who Killed Jesus? (It Wasn’t God)

    Look closely at the Gospels, and you’ll see: Jesus wasn’t executed by God’s hand.
    He was crucified by Rome, at the urging of religious leaders.
    Empire and religion, working together, do what they always do to threats: they eliminate them.

    They silence them.
    They crucify them.
    They declare them dangerous, and they snuff them out.

    Jesus didn’t die to appease God — he died because he exposed the corruption of both empire and religious establishment.

    His life was a living protest against systems built on power, exclusion, and violence.

    • He ate with “sinners” and “outcasts”.
    • He healed on the Sabbath.
    • He forgave without a sacrifice.
    • He called out the religious elite as “whitewashed tombs.”

    They didn’t kill him because he was too holy.
    They killed him because he was too loving, too dangerous, too uncontrollable.

    Photo by Arthur Karapetyan on Pexels.com

    The Symbolism of the Cross: A Bigger Story

    If Jesus’ death wasn’t about paying off God, then what was it about?

    Through a mystical lens, the cross is layered with meaning:

    • It’s a mirror. It shows us what we do to truth, to love, to the divine when it doesn’t fit the systems and constructs that we’ve created.
    • It’s an unveiling. It exposes the violence and corruption baked into both empire and religion. The need to be right and superior, rather than repentant and transformative.
    • It’s a victory. Not the victory of punishment fulfilled, but of death and violence defeated — precisely because love resurrects.
    • And it’s an invitation. To leave behind systems of fear and step into love and alignment.

    Jesus didn’t die to uphold the sacrificial system of death and lack.
    He died to end it and bring life and abundance.

    In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says he came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. And how did he fulfill it? By embodying what the Law was always pointing toward: mercy, justice, love, faith. He became the final sacrifice — not because God needed blood, but because we needed to see, once and for all, that sacrifices were never the point.

    The divine doesn’t trade in blood debts.

    The divine trades in grace, mercy, blessings, and mystery.

    So… Does God Need Blood?

    No.

    God doesn’t need blood — we do.
    We were the ones who believed sacrifices made us clean.
    We were the ones who demanded violence and death to balance the scales.

    The cross is Jesus stepping into our broken system and letting it do its worst, only to rise again and prove that love is stronger than hate, forgiveness stronger than vengeance, and life stronger than death.

    The cross wasn’t about satisfying divine wrath from a sense of lack or separation.
    It was about unmasking human wrath and showing us a better way through faith, abundance, alignment, and generosity.

    Jesus’ LIFE … his radical compassion, his healing, his forgiveness… was the point all along.
    The resurrection isn’t proof that God accepted the payment.
    It’s proof that the powers of this world don’t get the final say.

    That there is a better Way that’s been unfolding straight from the Source.

    And it’s inviting us, leading us all somewhere greater in the here and now.

    So let’s stop worshiping a bloodthirsty warlord and start following the revolutionary, resurrected Jesus — the one who taught us that God’s love doesn’t come at the end of a whip or a nail… but at the table for the least of these, with bread, wine, and an invitation to love like he did.

    Because that’s the Gospel.

    And that’s enough.

    You are enough.

    A Child of God.

    What does this stir in you? Let’s wrestle with it together in the comments.

  • The Cross Was Never “Plan A”

    Photo by Luis Quintero on Pexels.com

    At my church growing up, Easter was an event.

    Not just Sunday morning services. I’m talking full-scale theatrical production, like small-town Broadway with a crucifixion. We called it an Easter play, but really, it was a full-blown Passion drama — complete with billboards along the highway featuring my sister on Jesus’ lap, men in the congregation growing out their beards for historical accuracy, and a backstage makeup crew armed with fake blood and latex scars like a low-budget horror film masquerading as salvation.

    My actual sister talking to Jesus, aka my friend’s dad Jim, for our Easter Spectacular

    The sanctuary would transform into ancient Jerusalem. Lights dimmed. Smoke machines puffed out an eerie haze. Roman soldiers stomped around in homemade armor. I can still hear the clank of their plastic spears on dowels against the grey-carpeted plywood stage. And then there was Jesus — usually played by the same middle-aged volunteer every year, my friend’s dad Jim, who somehow managed to look both exhausted and radiant under the spotlight as they lashed him and led him to the cross he had just carried through the audience.

    Musical numbers were woven throughout, of course. These weren’t your tame, soft-rock worship hits. (Although we definitely included Avalon’s timeless CCM banger, “Testify To Love”) These were operatic, full-throated ballads about blood, sacrifice, and salvation. High drama. Choir robes swaying. And every spring, as the trees outside the church began to bud and bloom, those songs would crawl back into my head like ghosts of Easter past.

    We didn’t just perform it once, either. No, we ran it for a full weekend, sometimes longer. And after the play wrapped, we’d leave the cross standing at the front of the church like a trophy. For weeks afterward, during regular services, it loomed there — scarred, splintered, stained — casting its shadow over every sermon, every song.

    I remember sitting there as a kid, sandwiched between my friends, half-distracted by thoughts of holding hands with one of the girls in the youth group, sneaking glances during altar calls. Hormones and holy fear mixed together in a strange cocktail of confusion.

    But beneath my adolescent daydreams, another thought kept gnawing at me.

    Why did it have to be this way?

    Even as a kid, part of me wondered why the story was written in blood. Why the whole spectacle — the torment, the torture, the grotesque display of violence — was presented as good news. Why God, who supposedly loved us beyond comprehension, needed so much suffering to be satisfied.

    I didn’t have the words for it then. I just knew something felt off.

    Now, all these years later, I’ve started to understand what that feeling was.

    It wasn’t doubt.

    It was an invitation.

    That invitation would take years to answer. But eventually, it led me to question everything I thought I knew about the cross.

    Photo by Patricia McCarty on Pexels.com

    I grew up believing the cross was God’s “Plan A”.

    That from the dawn of time, God had been building toward this gruesome, brutal solution to the problem of human sin. That our rebellion was so total, so cosmic, that the only way for God to stomach our existence was to watch His own Son be tortured to death like a common criminal.

    They told me this was love.

    But I remember staring at the blood-stained cross in the sanctuary, week after week, and feeling something under my ribs tighten. Not reverence. Not relief.

    Grief.

    Confusion.

    A quiet, trembling sense that something here didn’t fully add up.

    Because if God is love… real love, unconditional love, not transaction-in-disguise love… then why the need to demand blood at all? Why set up a system of cosmic justice that could only be balanced by violence? Why build a universe that requires innocent suffering to fix what fear and separation broke?

    The deeper I went, the harder it became to reconcile the claim that Jesus’ death was necessary with the belief that God is, at essence, goodness itself. Not just good “to us,” but good at His very core level of being.

    And it turns out, the language had been whispering to me the whole time. I just didn’t know how to listen.

    Photo by Karol Wiu015bniewski on Pexels.com

    See, we inherited a story shaped not just by scripture, but by centuries of empire. Empire loves blood sacrifice — because empire lives by the sword and dies by the sword. Empire loves a violent god, because it justifies its own violence.

    But buried beneath the empire’s version of the gospel is an older song.

    Take atonement, for example. We were taught it meant appeasing God’s wrath. But the English word comes from “at-one-ment.” Union. Restoration of relationship.

    Or repentance. The Greek is metanoia — not groveling, but a change of mind. A widening of perception. A turning toward the light.

    And in Hebrew, there’s teshuvah — not a groveling apology, but a return. A homecoming. It literally means “to turn back,” not toward punishment, but toward the Source of life itself. Teshuvah is the art of remembering where we belong, of finding our way back to wholeness when we’ve lost the path. (I wrote about it at length in this blog post a few weeks ago.)

    Even sin. The Greek hamartia means “to miss the mark.” Not a legal violation deserving execution or bloodshed, but a distortion of aim. A sickness needing healing, not punishment.

    And sacrifice? Long before it became code for slaughter, the Latin roots point to “to make sacred.”

    To make sacred.

    What if Jesus didn’t die to satisfy God’s demand for violence, but to make sacred even the ugliest parts of our human story? To enter into the belly of the beast — into the empire’s machine of war, death, and brutality — and expose it for what it really is?

    A sham.

    A system built on fear, fed by scapegoats, perpetuated by people too terrified to imagine another way.

    The cross was never Plan A.

    Plan A was — and always has been — union.

    Plan A was the Garden. Walking together in the cool of the day. No separation, no shame, no sacrifice needed.

    Plan A was breath. Spirit. Ruach. The animating presence of God in all things.

    But we lost our way. Not because God demanded blood, but because we did. We built religions of fear and altars of violence, believing that blood would keep the gods at bay.

    And Jesus — Yeshua — stepped into our madness not to affirm it, but to dismantle it from the inside.

    To let it exhaust itself on his body.

    And then, to rise from the grave, holding out his wounds not as receipts of divine satisfaction, but as evidence of our deliverance from the system we thought would save us.

    The cross is not a transaction.

    It’s a revelation.

    A revelation of what happens when divine love collides with human fear.

    And a revelation that, in the end, love always has the last word.

    I’ll be unpacking this more in my next post: Does God Need Blood?

    But for tonight, let this question linger:

    What if the cross was never Plan A?

    What if God’s original plan was never punishment, but participation?
    Never condemnation, but communion?

    And what if the resurrection is not God’s bailout of a broken system, but the unveiling of a love, miraculous and powerful, that has been beneath it all, waiting to be discovered?

    We’ll go there.

    Soon.

    Stay tuned.

    Thanks for taking the time to read my blogs! I’d love it if you subscribed or left a comment, especially if something resonates with you or if your church had an easter play and I brought up some memories! -JD

  • John the Baptist

    The Wild Prophet

    Photo by Tobias Bjørkli on Pexels.com

    When we think about John the Baptist, we tend to picture a ragged, half-crazed desert preacher — camel hair for clothes, wild honey in his beard, shouting about repentance while dunking people in the Jordan River. A supporting character at the beginning of Jesus’ story. The opening act before the main event.

    In my opinion, we’ve sanded down his rough edges a little too much.

    John the Baptizer wasn’t just a quirky preacher paving the way for Jesus. He was a societal disruptor. A revolutionary. A wilderness prophet who stood outside the system not just geographically, but theologically. He wasn’t just announcing Jesus; he was embodying a radical shift — one we still wrestle with today.

    Let’s take a deeper look at the man Jesus called “the greatest among those born of women” (Matthew 11:11).

    Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

    The Wilderness Prophet

    John didn’t preach in the temple. He preached in the wilderness. That alone should be setting off all the lights on your dashboard. Something more is going on here just beneath the surface.

    In Jewish thought, the wilderness wasn’t just a location. It was a symbol. Chaos. Testing. Transformation. Israel wandered there for forty years. Prophets met God there. Jesus would be tested there.

    And John? He didn’t just visit the wilderness. He became it.

    • He wore camel’s hair and a leather belt — the uniform of Elijah (2 Kings 1:8), signaling that he wasn’t just another preacher but a prophet in the old tradition, standing in defiance against the powerful and idolatrous.
    • He ate locusts and wild honey — food of the poor, the unclean, the untamed.
    • He rejected the privilege and status of his priestly lineage (his father, Zechariah, was a temple priest) and instead lived on the fringes of society.

    He wasn’t a prophet within the system. He was a prophet who was raging against the system.

    Repentance: More Than Feeling Bad

    John’s central message boiled down to one word: “Repent!”

    But the Greek word used — metanoia — doesn’t mean “feel bad for your sins.” It literally means “change your mind,” or more deeply, “go beyond your current way of thinking.”

    John wasn’t calling people to wallow in guilt. He was calling them to wake up. To see differently. To think differently. To change their mind.

    Repentance wasn’t about religious rule-following. It was about freedom — stepping out of old patterns, old assumptions, old ways of being, and into something new. It was about loosening the grip of fear, power, and control so people could be in a state to recognize the Kingdom that Jesus was bringing.

    My friends in Convictions actually released a song all about this type of spiritual shift aptly titled “Metanoia” and if you’re in to Metalcore you should check it out!

    “Underwater Swimming” by Tim Marshall/ CC0 1.0

    Baptism: A Radical Act of Rebirth

    Baptism wasn’t new. Ritual washing was already a part of Jewish tradition. But as with most things in the scriptures: John did something different. Something new.

    In the temple, ritual washing was about purity — preparing to enter God’s presence. It was something you did repeatedly, cleansing yourself over and over.

    John took it out of the temple and into the Jordan River. And suddenly, it wasn’t about ritual purity anymore.

    It was about death and rebirth.

    Going under the water was a symbolic burial of the old self. Rising up was a step into new life. A life not defined by Rome, not controlled by the temple, not shackled by fear.

    It wasn’t about being clean. It was about being free.

    The Baptist and the Lamb

    Then one day, Jesus showed up at the river.

    John saw him and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29)

    It’s easy to miss how shocking that was. The crowd would have expected a Messiah described as a lion — a warrior-king, a liberator.

    But John calls him a lamb — a symbol not of power, but of sacrifice.

    John saw what others missed. Jesus wasn’t coming to conquer through violence. He was coming to conquer through self-giving love. Flipping the whole thing upside down.

    What John Means for Us

    John’s life wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t safe. It ended in a prison cell, with his head on a platter.

    But his radical message still echoes:

    • Go to the wilderness. Sometimes you have to leave the familiar — the systems, the beliefs, the comforts, the noise — and go out into unadulterated creation to hear God clearly.
    • Repent. Not by beating yourself up, but by letting go of the old familiar ways that no longer serve truth or love.
    • Step into the water. Leave behind what’s false. Rise into what’s real.
    • Point to the Lamb. Even when people expect a lion or a king. Even when they want power and control, point to self-giving love instead.

    John reminds us that sometimes, the way to prepare for new life is to step outside of the old one — even when it’s messy, uncomfortable, or lonely.

    Because the wilderness isn’t where life ends.

    It’s where new life begins.

  • Lost in Translation: How Etymology Woke Me Up

    It started with… a sandwich.

    Not a metaphorical one — an actual turkey-and-cheese situation I threw together on a rushed lunch break. For some reason, I wondered why we call it a “sandwich” in the first place.

    Wasn’t Sandwich a place? Or an Island?

    A quick google search later, I’m staring at the ridiculous story of John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, too busy gambling to step away for dinner, so he ordered meat stuffed between bread. And now, centuries later, here I am — not a nobleman or aristocrat, just a guy eating his Earl-named lunch.

    It was just kinda funny at first, but then the chord struck: this completely normal, everyday word carried a whole story inside of it — a story that almost nobody knows. This study of the origin and evolution of words, I found, was called etymology.

    So I kept going. I started studying the etymology of even more words. And that’s when things got weird.

    The Rabbit Hole Begins

    Take “clue,” for example.

    I always thought a clue was just… well, a hint. Something Sherlock Holmes sniffs out. But the word traces back to “klew,” meaning a ball of yarn — like the one from the Greek myth of Theseus. He didn’t solve the labyrinth with a sword or brute force; he found his way out by unwinding a ball of thread, or klew, to retrace his steps.

    A clue wasn’t originally about solving something — it was about finding the way home.

    Then there’s “sincere.” We use it to mean genuine or honest, but its roots go back to Latin: “sine cera” — meaning “without wax.” Back then, sculptors would use wax to cover flaws or cracks in their work. A statue that was truly flawless didn’t need the cover-up. It was sine cera — pure, unhidden, whole.

    How wild is that? Sincerity, at its core, isn’t just honesty — it’s wholeness without the cover-up.

    Words That Hold More Than We Realize

    The more I dug, the more I realized how many words hide deeper, almost poetic truths.

    • “Disaster” — from the Greek “dis” (bad) and “aster” (star). It literally means “bad star,” a misfortune caused by the heavens.

    • “Companion” — from Latin “com” (with) and “panis” (bread). A companion isn’t just a friend — it’s someone you break bread with.

    • “Ecstasy” — from Greek “ekstasis,” meaning “to stand outside oneself.” It’s not just joy — it’s a moment so powerful it pulls you out of your own being into a state of bliss.

    And then I stumbled on something bigger — words that didn’t just hold history, but felt like they were pointing to something about humanity itself.

    Breathing in the Divine

    Let’s talk about “inspire.”

    It’s a word we hear all the time — motivational speakers throw it around like confetti. But the root meaning knocked me sideways.

    “Inspire” comes from the Latin “inspirare,” which literally means “to breathe into.” It wasn’t about feeling motivated to write a book or start a project — it meant being filled with breath, with life itself.

    It’s the same word used to describe how God breathes life into “Adam” in the Genesis story — the very breath of existence. I’ll dive in to the etymology of Adam and Eve another time…

    Inspiration wasn’t about productivity. It was about being alive.

    Desire, Fire, and Stars

    Then I found “desire.”

    It’s another word we think we understand — wanting something, longing for it. But its origin is so much more than that.

    “Desire” comes from “de” (from) and “sidera” (stars). It’s origins literally mean “from the stars.”

    Desire wasn’t about craving or lust. It was about yearning for something beyond this world — a pull toward the heavens.

    And the more I sat with that, the more I couldn’t ignore the pattern:

    • Disaster — a bad star.

    • Desire — a longing from the stars.

    • Inspiration — the breath of life itself.

    • Ecstasy — to step outside yourself.

    It’s like these words were trying to remind us of something — that we’re not meant to be stuck down here in the dirt, chasing power, money, cars, impressive titles, or just surviving. We’re meant to breathe deeply, reach for the stars, and step outside ourselves.

    The Awakening Beneath the Words

    Somewhere in this journey, it stopped feeling like I was learning trivia. It felt more like I was waking up to something ancient — something we used to know but forgot along the way.

    Words are time capsules. They carry not just definitions, but stories, beliefs, and truths that our ancestors lived and breathed. And those truths still pulse beneath the surface, waiting for us to notice them.

    We didn’t invent language to make small talk. We invented it to name the things that stir our souls.

    We long for the stars — desire.

    We’re filled with life — inspire.

    We ache to step outside ourselves — ecstasy.

    And even our disasters are written in the heavens — stars.

    Language, it turns out, isn’t just about communication. It’s a mirror — one that reflects back who we’ve always been: creatures caught between earth and sky, longing for more.

    I’m not sure if words saved my soul, but they sure as hell woke it up.

    And to think… all of this beauty and wonder and history started with… a sandwich.

  • Severance and the Divided Self: A Spiritual Reflection

    Spoiler Warning: This post has some Season 1 Spoilers

    “Your so-called self…is a lie.”

    That line from Severance, TV’s mind-bending dystopian masterpiece, feels like a handshake with your innie — intimate, unsettling, and not meant for this version of you. The show takes a simple, horrifying premise—what if your work self and your outside self were completely severed from each other?—and spins it into a deep, unsettling meditation on identity, control, and the nature of consciousness.

    Just beneath the surface of its eerie corporate corridors and existential horror, Severance carries a spiritual weight that I picked up on from the first episode. It speaks to something primal in us, something fundamental to my own worldview—this sense that we are divided, fragmented, struggling to reconcile the different pieces of ourselves. That we live in a world that demands compartmentalization, while something deep inside us longs to be whole.

    And at the heart of it all, a question: Who are you, really?

    The Innie/Outie Divide

    The entire concept of Severance—splitting a person into two consciousnesses, one that only exists at work and one that only exists outside of it—is terrifying because it’s just a more extreme version of what we already do.

    We wear social masks. We create personas. We play roles. The person we are in one environment feels radically different from the person we are in another. We adapt to survive, but in doing so, we fracture ourselves.

    This is what many traditions call the false self—the identity shaped by external expectations, fear, and survival mechanisms. It is the mask we wear to navigate the world. In the show, the “Outie” (the self outside of work) believes they are in control, while the “Innie” (work self) exists in a state of perpetual servitude. The Innie wakes up every morning with no past, no future—only memories of work. Only obedience. And yet, the Innie is the one who begins to question, to resist, to long for something more that they know exists beneath the surface if they could just figure out how to access it.

    Spiritually speaking, the Innie is like the soul. The part of us trapped in a system it didn’t choose. The part that begins to awaken, often in suffering, often in darkness, and asks: Is this all there is? Is this who I am?

    The Great Lie of Control

    Lumon Industries, the cold and god-like corporation at the heart of Severance, operates like a religious system gone wrong. It offers salvation in the form of certainty—your work self will never have to worry about the outside world, and your outside self will never have to be burdened with the misery of work. A perfect, ordered existence.

    But that order comes at the cost of freedom. And doesn’t that feel sort of familiar? Doesn’t that always tend to be the trade?

    Religious institutions, political systems, and cultural structures often give the promise of peace, security, and identity—so long as you don’t question. So long as you accept the role assigned to you. So long as you don’t resist.

    But true spirituality—true awakening—is and has always been about curiosity and questioning. It is the Innie looking up from the fluorescent-lit purgatory of Lumon’s halls and thinking, “There has to be more.”

    It is Jesus saying, “The truth will set you free.”

    It is Lao Tzu saying, “Knowing others is intelligence, knowing yourself is true wisdom.”

    It is the mystic realization that the walls around us are merely constructs, that the roles we’ve been given are not who we are, and that something vast, wild, and uncontainable calls us to move beyond them.

    Reintegration and Wholeness

    One of the most haunting parts of Severance is the sheer horror of reintegration—the idea that the Innie and Outie might become one, that the veil might be lifted, and the full self might finally be known. The fear isn’t just about discovery—it’s about what that discovery would cost.

    Because wholeness always costs something.

    To awaken spiritually, to step into a fuller, truer way of being, means facing and shedding our illusions. It means facing truths we’ve been conditioned to avoid. It means no longer hiding in the comfortable amnesia of our constructed identities. Who we think we are.

    But here’s the paradox: that wholeness, that integration, is what we were truly meant for.

    The way I see it, sin is not about rule-breaking—it’s about fragmentation. It is the sickness of separation, of being divided from ourselves, from each other, and from the Source. It is looking for the cure to come from somewhere or something else. And Salvation? Liberation? That’s reintegration. That’s truly healing and becoming whole.

    Severance is a horror story because it shows us what happens when we are forced into separation. But it is also a call to wake up. To fight for our own reintegration. To remember that the walls we place between us are not real. That the prison of the false self is not our home.

    Because we are not meant to be divided.

    We are meant to be free.

    What Now?

    So where do we go from here? If the false self is a prison and the Source calls us to reintegration, what does that look like in the real world — beyond metaphor and mysticism.

    Reintegration starts with the radical act of seeing. Becoming aware. Seeing the masks we wear, the roles we play, and recognizing that they are not who we are. It’s looking at the systems — religious, political, social — that demand our compartmentalization and asking, “Who benefits from my division?”

    Lumon thrives because its workers are divided, docile, and obedient. So do the institutions that profit from keeping us fragmented. They need us to cling to tribal identities — to believe that we are separate, that we must defend ‘us’ against ‘them.’ They thrive on our belief that our Outie is righteous while our Innie deserves punishment, or that our neighbor’s Innie is somehow less human than our own.

    But what if we stopped playing along? What if we refused to see anyone as an Innie or an Outie — as “us” or “them” — and instead recognized the whole, sacred self in everyone we meet?

    Connecting with the Source isn’t about climbing a ladder to some distant, holy plane somewhere else. It’s about remembering that we never left. The Source isn’t out there. It’s within, and it’s within everyone else, too. It’s in your boss, your barista, your enemy. It’s in the waffle party and the melon bar. It’s in the strangest corners of existence — and the most mundane. It is the deep, cosmic hum beneath everything, calling us back to each other.

    And what do we do with this freedom? We live like people who remember the truth: that we belong to each other. That we are not cogs in someone else’s machine. We create, we love, we resist systems that demand our obedience, and we help others awaken to the reality that they were never meant to live as half a person.

    The final scene of season 1 of Severance is harrowing and powerful — the Innie awakens, sees the truth, and screams it into a world that doesn’t yet know how to listen. That’s the risk of waking up. The world might not be ready for the whole you.

    But wake up anyway.

    Because you were never meant to stay asleep.

  • Literal or Literate?: How Your Understanding of the Bible Can Awaken Your Faith

    Most of my life, I read the Bible the way I was taught: like an instruction manual, each verse standing alone, perfectly clear in its meaning without any errors. If it said the world was made in six days, then six literal 24-hour days it was. If Jesus said, pluck out your eye if it causes you to sin, well, thank God no one took that literally… but we understood most of it that way—at face value. As if the text had been written last week, by God himself, in plain English for a modern American audience.

    Turns out, that’s not how books—especially ancient books—work.

    The word bible actually means “the books”, and if you took Spanish you may already know that it is etymologically tied to the word library. Most Protestant and Evangelical churches teach the Bible as a monolithic univocal document dropped from the sky in its final form, rather than the living, breathing, deeply human library of writings it actually is. And when we flatten it, we lose its beauty, depth, and—ironically—its truth.

    The problem, however, is not the Bible itself. The problem, my friends, is how we often read and interpret it.  The way in which we read the Bible (or our hermeneutics for short) changes everything. What happens if we read it literately instead of literally? What if we took it seriously enough to see it as it actually is—a collection of books with different genres, written by different people across centuries, in different cultural contexts, with different purposes? Suddenly, the Bible doesn’t just make more sense. It comes alive.

    What Does It Mean to Read the Bible Literately?

    To read literately means reading with an awareness of what kind of text we’re dealing with. Is it poetry? Prophecy? Myth? Parable? A first-century Jewish sermon? A legal code from a nomadic desert tribe? A deeply symbolic apocalyptic vision?

    Imagine streaming Breaking Bad like a DIY tutorial. You’d walk away thinking anyone with a Winnebago and a chemistry set can build an empire. That’s how many modern Christians read the Bible—mistaking poetry for science, metaphor for history, and cultural laws for eternal commandments for all people throughout time.

    A literate approach considers the:

    • Genre – Are we reading history, poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, a letter, or an apocalyptic vision? Each one of these requires an entirely different lens.

    • Author & Audience – Who wrote this, who were they writing to, and why? A letter from Paul to a church in 1st-century Rome isn’t a universal law for all people for all of time.

    • Original Language – Words in Hebrew and Greek often don’t translate neatly into English. Nuance gets lost. A single word, sometimes even a letter, can change everything.

    • Historical and Cultural Context – What was happening in their world when this was written? What cultural assumptions would the original readers have had? Where is the setting?

    How We’ve Gotten It Wrong

    Let’s take a look at a few well-known passages and see how a literate approach changes things:

    • Genesis 1 – The creation story here is structured poetically, with rhythmic repetition and symbolic numbers (7 days, representing perfection and completeness). It’s less a scientific blueprint and more a beautiful theological statement: God, our Source, brings order from chaos. And did you know there are actually 2 different creation stories in the book of Genesis? And if we try to read it literally, the creation stories have some pretty significant differences, including which name it calls God.

    • The Book of Job – Often misunderstood as a historical account, Job reads more like an ancient drama exploring human suffering and the nature of God. It opens with a heavenly wager between God and “the Satan” (which means ‘the accuser,’ not necessarily the devil who is never even mentioned in the Hebrew Bible) — a setup that sounds more like a stage play than a court transcript.

    • The Parables of Jesus – The Good Samaritan isn’t just a nice story about kindness. To Jesus’ audience, Samaritans were despised outsiders from another country. His point was and still is scandalous: The “enemy” is the one who is showing God’s love. A literal English reading often misses that gut-punch.

    • Revelation – Apocalyptic literature is highly symbolic. Reading Revelation like a future newspaper misses its original purpose: to offer hope to persecuted Christians under Roman rule. The Beast isn’t your least favorite politician from that other evil party — it most likely represented Emperor Nero. You know… in Rome?

    How This Can Change Your Faith (For the Better)

    If you stop reading the Bible like a list of divine tweets straight from God’s thumbs and start reading it as a collection of ancient, sacred, deeply human writings wrestling with the divine, something happens.

    1. It becomes way more interesting – No more boring, redundant rulebook. Instead, you’re diving into ancient poetry, mystical visions, political resistance literature, and letters of encouragement to underground faith communities.
    2. It opens itself to mystery – Instead of needing everything to be perfectly clear, rigid, and factual, you may start embracing subversive language, paradox, symbol, and meanings with deeply rich layers.
    3. It frees you from harmful interpretations – A literal reading has been used to justify war, slavery, misogyny, homophobia, and genocide. A literate reading recognizes when a text is describing something, not prescribing it.
    4. It deepens your connection to the Divine – Rather than a static set of rules and doctrines, you encounter a dynamic conversation with God, one that invites you, like its characters, to wrestle, question, doubt, misunderstand, and grow.

    Jesus Read the Scriptures This Way… So We Should Too.

    Jesus himself did not read Scripture literally. He was so intimately aware of the spirit within the words that he reinterpreted, reframed, and challenged the common readings of his time. “You have heard it said… but I tell you…” was his way of saying, Hey, you’ve been reading this wrong. Let me show you what it actually means. Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

    When we move from literalism to literacy, we’re by no means abandoning Scripture—we’re respecting it. We’re engaging with it the way it was meant to be engaged: as an unfolding revelation, a window into the divine, a story that pulls us deeper into love, justice, peace, and transformation.

    I think that’s part of what Jesus meant when he said, “The truth will set you free.“

    And maybe, just maybe, it starts by learning how to read.

    Resources

    If you’re curious about diving deeper, here are some authors and books that have been helpful to me:

    • Inspired by Rachel Held Evans

    • The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns

    • What Is the Bible? by Rob Bell

    • Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright

    • Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth E. Bailey

    • The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr

    Also check out the fascinating public scholar work of Dan McClellan.  He’s about to release his first book since he took his work public called “The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues” on April 29th.  In the meantime check him out on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube. I also have a resources tab here, but I haven’t had the time to really put much together over there yet while I focus on writing and getting this blogging thing started.

    Happy reading.

    And happy un-reading, too.

  • Embracing Doubt: A Journey Through Faith Deconstruction

    A quick note: I’m currently writing a book. It’s going to be a spiritual autobiography that will include much of what’s in this post, and much of what’s already been posted on this blog, but will go into much greater depth. The topic of deconstruction alone has inspired entire blogs and books of their own. So with that being said, here’s a glimpse into my journey through deconstruction.

    -JD Merrill

    I remember the first time I felt the floor cracking beneath my faith.

    It wasn’t a slow erosion… it was an earthquake. A single question at first, then another, then a tidal wave of doubt that left me gasping for air. Things that had once felt rock-solid… God’s goodness, the reliability of scripture, the purpose behind it all… suddenly seemed fragile, even hollow.

    And the worst part?

    I had been taught that doubt was the enemy.

    In the faith tradition I grew up in, questioning wasn’t just discouraged: it was dangerous. It meant you were “backsliding,” being “led astray,” giving in to the deception of the world. There was a formula: Believe. Obey. Don’t ask too many questions. If the answers didn’t make sense, the problem was with you, not the system. So when my questions became louder than the sermons, when my prayers felt like they were evaporating into silence, I was left with an unbearable weight of guilt.

    Maybe you know the feeling.

    Maybe you’ve sat in a church service, surrounded by people singing with a sense of certainty, while something inside you whispered, I don’t know if I believe this anymore. Maybe you’ve tried to ignore the nagging contradictions, hoping that if you just had more faith, the doubts would go away. Maybe you’ve been told that your questions mean that you’re losing your faith. But what if that’s not true? What if deconstruction isn’t falling away, but waking up?

    When the House Falls Down

    For a long time, I saw faith like a house. A sturdy, well-built structure I had inherited, passed down from generations before me. It had walls made of doctrines, floors of biblical inerrancy, a roof of absolute certainty. It kept me safe. It kept everything in order. But when the cracks started forming, when I realized some of those walls weren’t as solid as I had been told, the whole thing started shaking. And when it finally collapsed, I thought I had lost everything. I felt like I had lost a God who had been my best friend for my entire life.

    For me, deconstruction started in the background, on the periphery, like a creeping vine I wasn’t paying too much attention to. When something didn’t make sense to me, I could just set that aside until I had better understanding or a new perspective. I had always been one to challenge tradition and the status quo. I was raised charismatic, after all, so if something didn’t resonate with my spirit, I needed to know why. Why do we do things this way instead of that way? If I understood the “why” I could either get on board, or find a new avenue.

    After leaving the church we met at, my wife and I were part of planting a new church. As the Worship Leader I had the opportunity to decide what kind of songs and what kind of theology we were going to incorporate through music. So I started really paying attention to the lyrics of every song, to see if they resonated with what we believed, and what this new church was going to believe.

    Bring On The Questions

    It wasn’t the big doctrines that wavered at first—it was what I would consider secondary beliefs:

    Was Noah’s Ark historical?

    Was Jonah really swallowed by a great fish and survived?

    Was Jesus actually born of a virgin?

    Was the Earth created in 6 business days?

    Were these stories meant to be taken literally, or was there something deeper I was missing?

    As time went on, however, the questions grew bolder. The cracks spread. Pretty much everything except the person of Jesus stopped making sense to me… or at least, it didn’t make sense in the way I had always understood it.

    And all the while, I was still leading worship. Still married to a Christian woman that I met at church. Still getting my paycheck from the church. It wasn’t just my faith that was unraveling. It was my entire identity. My career. My way of life. Worship leading wasn’t just my job; it was who I was. It was the thing I had always wanted to do, the dream I had carried since I was a kid.

    And then, one night, while studying the Bible and examining the lyrics to a song, the last brick in the foundation of my faith crumbled.

    And I still had to lead worship practice.

    I had to pray out loud to lead a worship team that I was building, who were looking to me to lead them, knowing I no longer believed in a God who was out there somewhere listening. I had to lift my hands in the songs I had led a thousand times before, knowing they no longer meant the same thing to me. I had to stand in a room full of people who had no idea that, inside, I felt like I was disappearing.

    The Dark Night of the Soul

    This journey through doubt and uncertainty is not a new phenomenon. In the 16th century, St. John of the Cross wrote about the Dark Night of the Soul, describing it as a period of spiritual desolation, disorientation, and doubt that precedes a deeper communion with the Divine. He wrote:

    “To come to the knowledge you have not, You must go by a way in which you know not.” —St. John of the Cross

    Contemporary theologian Peter Rollins echoes this sentiment, suggesting that embracing doubt is integral to authentic faith. He says it this way:

    “The point is only that the believer should not repress the shadow of doubt that hangs over all belief… Instead, the believer ought to acknowledge and even celebrate this dark night of the soul, understanding that this is not a threatening darkness which conceals an enemy but rather is the intimate darkness within which we embrace our faith.” —Peter Rollins

    Deconstruction as an Invitation

    For so many of us, deconstruction starts with grief. The loss of certainty, the unraveling of everything we thought we knew. But what if it’s not just an ending?

    What if it’s an invitation?

    To see the Divine… not in rigid doctrines, but in the uncontainable vastness of reality itself. To find meaning… not in having all the answers, but in the beauty of the mystery. To encounter “God”… not in the places we were told they must be, but in the places we never expected.

    For me, the breaking of my faith wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of something deeper, something freer. I stopped looking for God in the confines of a religious system and started experiencing the sacred in the very fabric of existence. In music that shook me to my core. In the stillness of the morning. In the unfiltered, unforced moments of love and connection that needed no theological justification to be real. And here’s the paradox: It wasn’t until I let go of certainty that I actually found something worth holding onto.

    Losing to Find

    Jesus once said, “Whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” I think that can apply to our faith, too. Maybe the faith we were handed… the kind that demands certainty, that requires obedience without question, that fears doubt like a disease… was never the point. For me it was just scaffolding, a temporary structure meant to get us to a place where we could finally encounter something real. The loss of that faith doesn’t have to be just a tragedy. Maybe it’s the first breath of freedom.

    What Next?

    If you’re in that space of the in-between, the aftermath, the uncertainty I want to tell you something I wish someone had told me:

    You are not broken.

    You are not wrong.

    You are not failing.

    You are not alone.

    But… please keep an open mind.

    I didn’t mean to stop believing in God. It wasn’t a choice I made, a rebellion I embraced, or a philosophy I eagerly adopted. It was more like a slow, unrelenting erosion… like the tide pulling the sand from beneath my feet until I realized there was nothing left to stand on.

    At first, there was grief. Crying in my car outside of a church because I couldn’t’t take communion. That was for believers, and for the first time I was on the outside of that. But over a few weeks that led to a sense of relief. The weight of trying to reconcile an ancient faith with the brutal realities of the modern world had been exhausting. Without God, I was free. Free from the cognitive dissonance, the theological gymnastics, the need to justify suffering with some twisted divine purpose. Free to love and accept everyone, no matter their religion, sexual orientation, voting record, or any of the other ways we divide ourselves.

    There was something clean about it, something sharp. The world made sense in a way it never had before… random, indifferent, ruled by chaos and natural laws rather than magical celestial orders. And for a while, that was enough. I leaned into thinkers like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, reveling in their unflinching logic. I found comfort in the idea that morality was an evolutionary construct, not a divine mandate. The universe didn’t care, and maybe that was okay.

    But atheism, like the faith I had left, held its own brand of certainty and exclusivity. I saw it in online debates, in the way ex-believers scoffed at spirituality, dismissing anything beyond the material as childish wishful thinking. And if I was honest with myself, I had adopted that same posture. I had traded one dogma for another, one absolute for a different kind. I became cynical. There was no room for mystery, no space for wonder. The vastness of existence had been reduced to atoms and neurons, cause and effect. And yet, something in me still ached.

    It was in that emptiness that I found something unexpected. Or rather, something found me. Because even when I had deconstructed everything, even when I had tried to empty myself of God, there was still… something.

    Not the old man in the sky. Not the tribal deity of my childhood. But a presence, a current, a whisper beneath all things. It wasn’t a return to certainty, it was a surrender to unknowing. And in that surrender, I began to heal. I embraced experience, and found hope in adopting a mystical lens.

    Deconstruction is not the end. It is the beginning. The bravest thing you can do is walk into the dark, not knowing if the ground will hold, trusting that even in the void, you are not alone. Because once you have a real question, there is no way out, only a way through.

    As St. John of the Cross once wrote, “If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.”

    So for today, don’t be afraid of doubts.  Don’t be afraid of questions. Your community may not understand, and there may be very real risks in being authentic and striving for truth. But if you stay curious, brave the uncertainty, and refuse to accept hollow answers, you will find truth. What is true will remain true regardless of your questioning. And any “God” worth believing in, will be there on the other side in a way that’s more true than you ever thought possible. And when new questions or doubts arise, you will have the tools and experience needed to navigate the mystery with intellectual integrity and joy.

    And hopefully, like me, you’ll find that in the ancient wisdom traditions lies a truth that is so deep, so true, and so real that you have to use metaphor, allegory, and poetic language. Because once you pin down the butterfly to examine its wings, it loses its ability to fly.

    Stay curious, my friends. The truth runs in the deep streams.

  • “Hallelujah!”

    The Wild Unstoppable Cry of the Soul

    Growing up in a charismatic Pentecostal church and family, I heard the word Hallelujah a lot. Sure, it was shouted during sermons, whispered fervently in prayer, and sung with hands raised high. Usually, it was said as a trivial celebration when my mom found her keys or that thing she’d been looking for for weeks. I often hear it used sarcastically. When I was touring with Settle The Sky, my Christian metal band, Hallelujah was screamed into microphones, echoing through sweaty clubs and church basements, sometimes from the voices of kids who weren’t even sure what they believed—but something about that word felt powerful. And while everyone used this word, I felt like most people didn’t seem to be able to articulate what it really meant.

    Hallelujah isn’t just a word. It’s a cry. A defiant, unrelenting, soul-shaking exclamation that transcends language, genre, and even belief systems. It’s one of the few Hebrew words that has made its way, unchanged, into nearly every language on earth. My wife, Ariel, walked down the aisle to an acoustic version of this song whose only lyric was just the word Hallelujah.

    But what does Hallelujah actually mean? And why does it hold so much weight—whether whispered in worship, shouted in ecstatic praise, or screamed over a hardcore caveman riff in a Sleeping Giant song?

    The Etymology of Hallelujah:

    The word Hallelujah (הַלְלוּיָהּ) is made up of two parts:

    • Hallelu (הַלְלוּ) – A command meaning “praise” (from halal, meaning to shine, boast, or act wildly celebratory).

    • Yah (יָהּ) – A shortened form of YHWH, the divine name of God.

    So Hallelujah literally means “Praise God!” But not in a quiet, reserved, or passive way.

    The root word halal is wild. It comes from the exclamation of freedom. In Islam, if a food is “halal”, then it is praised by the divine and they are “free” to eat it. It means to boast, to rave, to shine, to act clamorously foolish in celebration. It’s the kind of word that doesn’t fit neatly into the stoic, buttoned-up version of faith so many of us were handed. Halal is loud. It’s undignified. It’s messy.

    It’s the kind of word that makes most religious people uncomfortable.

    Dance Dance Revolution

    One of the most unrestrained biblical pictures of true Hallelujah comes from 2 Samuel. King David, who was a warrior and poet, brings the Ark of the Covenant back to Jerusalem. And how does he celebrate?

    He dances.

    Furiously.

    He strips off his royal linen robes and dances before the Lord with all his might, completely unbothered by how ridiculous he looks. His wife, Michal, watches in disgust, embarrassed by his lack of dignity. That’s a striking image for Michal’s attitude toward David. She wasn’t just upset; she was cutting him off in her heart, separating herself from his joy and his deep, intimate worship before Yahweh. But David doesn’t care.

    “I will become even more undignified than this!” he tells her. “I will be humiliated in my own eyes!” -2 Samuel 6:22

    That is Hallelujah—the kind of unrestrained, all-consuming celebration that doesn’t care about appearances or what kind of societal consequences or judgment it brings up in others. The kind that doesn’t hold back. The kind that shakes the ground.

    Hallelujah in Metal, Hardcore, and Charismatic Worship

    When I look back, I realize that my time in the charismatic church and my time in metal and hardcore were deeply connected by this same reckless, passionate spirit.

    In charismatic churches, worship wasn’t just singing songs… it was warfare. It was an outpouring of emotion. People danced, shouted, wept, fell to their knees. Some spoke in tongues. Some shook under the weight of something they couldn’t explain. The band played loud, but not for performance or recognition, but because the Spirit was moving, and nothing about that moment should be tame.

    Then I stepped into the world of metal and alternative music, and I felt something eerily familiar. The intensity. The passion. The catharsis of screaming from the depths of your soul, of pushing your body to the limit, of letting go of self-consciousness and giving everything you have to something bigger than yourself. To the energy that was stirring up between everyone in the room.

    In the pit at a hardcore show, I saw people swinging fists, jumping off stages, pile-driving toward a moment that felt transcendent. When we played, I saw kids who wouldn’t set foot in a church scream their lungs out to lyrics about redemption, about sacrifice, about love, about hope. The church might not have understood our art form, but it was never really about playing music or getting fame or being a rock star. It was about uniting the broken in a moment of raw transcendence.

    To me, that is Hallelujah.

    Hallelujah and the Illusion of Separation

    There’s something about raw, undignified presence and unity that breaks through the illusion that we are separate from something greater. Not the polished, performance-driven kind that is trying to impress to satisfy an egoic need—but the kind that throws off every weight, every inhibition, and lets the soul truly cry out.

    Hallelujah is not about conformity. It’s about connection. It’s about that deep, undeniable pull that every mystic, every artist, every seeker has felt—the pull toward something vast, luminous, and overwhelmingly real. Whether you call it God, the Tao, the Divine, the Source, the Universe, or simply Love, there is something in all of us that knows:

    There is more.

    And we are all a part of it. We are all invited to leave our egos at the door so our truest self can be free.

    Hallelujah is the moment the wave crashes and you feel one with the ocean.

    It’s the lump in your throat when a song wrecks you in the best way.

    It’s the dancer lost in flow state movement, the poet captivated in words, the mother holding her child, the breath that catches in awe.

    It’s in the scream of a metalhead in the pit, in the whispered prayer of the doubter, in the sigh of the atheist staring up at the stars, feeling something too beautiful for words.

    Hallelujah isn’t just for “believers”. It isn’t just for “church”. It isn’t just for those who understand. It’s for whoever breathes.

    Psalm 150:6 – Let everything that has breath praise Yah.

    And Yah means YHWH

    The Invitation to Live Hallelujah

    Maybe you’ve been taught that spiritual connection had to look a certain way—had to fit into a religious mold that never quite felt right. Maybe, like me, you felt more of something divine in the roar of a crowd than in a pew. Maybe you were outcast by a church more focused on everyone believing and behaving the same way than having a real encounter with an untamed spirit. Maybe you’ve been waiting for permission to show up fully as you are, to throw off self-consciousness, to stop filtering your presence and just be—raw, honest, unrestrained.

    Here it is.

    Let your Hallelujah be loud. Let it be messy. Let it be real.

    Not because you have to worship a deity, or a god out there somewhere else, not because you need to fit into any system of belief, or any organized religion.

    But simply because you are alive.

    Because you are part of something bigger than yourself. Because your voice, your body, your breath, your existence—it all matters.

    Because to be fully alive, fully present, fully surrendered to this eternal moment—that is the cry of Hallelujah.

  • The God Without a Name

    Finding the Divine in the Breath of Life

    Zeus. Buddha. Shiva. Ra. Flying Spaghetti Monster.

    Have you ever wondered why most deities have names—but the Christian God is most often just called “God”? This used to baffle me as a kid. I remember thinking that other religions must think we’re so arrogant. We didn’t just claim our God was the one true God—we took the very word “God” and used it as His name.

    Names have power. They define, they distinguish, they shape how we understand something. Yet, in the Western World where it’s almost assumed that everyone is a Christian, the Divine is often left with a generic title rather than a personal name. Why?

    The answer to this mystery lies at the source. It is ancient and profound—something that has been hidden in plain sight within the earliest writings of the Bible itself.

    YHWH: The Breath of Existence

    The first time we encounter the Divine Name in the Hebrew Scriptures is in the story of Moses and the burning bush from the book of Exodus. Moses, a shepherd and fugitive, finds himself drawn to a strange sight—a bush engulfed in flames that is never consumed by the fire. As he approaches, he hears a voice calling his name. This is no ordinary moment; it is an encounter with the Divine.

    Moses asks the voice, “Who should I say sent me?”

    And the response is enigmatic, profound: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה)—or in English “I AM that I AM.” It is an answer that refuses definition, evading labels and fixed identities. Then, God gives Moses the Name: YHWH.

    This moment is mystical, deep, and powerful. The name revealed is not just a title but a verb, a state of being. I AM. It is existence itself, the ever-present, ever-unfolding Source. YHWH is not a static deity bound to a temple or an image but the very essence of life itself. The Israelites would come to see this name as so sacred that they wouldn’t use it in writing or speaking, because it is a mystery that could only be experienced but couldn’t be fully grasped or nailed down.

    Most scholars believe that it should be understood as a symbolic representation of God’s presence and call to Moses, rather than a completely literal account of a physical burning bush that did not burn up. The focus is on the divine encounter and the message conveyed, not necessarily the exact details of the imagery or its literal nature. Keep in mind that this writing is premodern and doing its best to give language and story to the mystery that we call the Divine.

    The Hebrew Bible does not originally call the Divine simply “God.” It speaks of YHWH (יהוה), a name so sacred that it was often left unspoken. But this isn’t just about reverence—it’s about something deeper.

    Some scholars and mystics suggest that YHWH is not a typical name at all, but an attempt to capture the sound of breathing. Say it slowly without vowels—YH…WH…—and you might notice how it mirrors the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling. In this sense, the Divine name is not meant to be spoken in the traditional sense, but experienced. Every breath we take is a reminder of the Source, the ever-present reality sustaining all life.

    I remember the first time I heard this idea, and it hit me like a punch to the gut. The name of the Divine—so ineffable, so untouchable—was something I had been unconsciously uttering my entire life. With every inhale and exhale, I had been speaking the Name. It wasn’t something separate from me; it was within me. It was me, and it was you, and it was everything that has breath. What animates us all.

    Why Was YHWH Left Unspoken?

    In Jewish tradition, YHWH is considered too sacred to pronounce. Instead, substitutes like Adonai (meaning “Lord”) or HaShem (meaning “The Name”) are used. But even these alternatives hint at something beyond language itself.

    Adonai, meaning “Lord” or “Master”—and also, incidentally, a banger of a song by Petra—comes from a root meaning “sovereign,” a term of reverence, yet it does not replace the unspeakable reality of YHWH—it only gestures toward it. The reluctance to speak the Name serves as a reminder that the Divine is beyond human categories, beyond definition, beyond limitation. The moment you try to define it, you lose it.

    This stands in stark contrast to modern Christianity’s casual use of the term “God.” It’s a catch-all phrase that has become so generic that it often loses its depth and mystery. Yet, the ancient understanding suggests something radically different: the Divine is not a concept to be named, but a presence to be encountered. A spirit to be present with.

    Echoes in Other Traditions

    This idea—that the Divine is beyond naming yet intimately present and accessible—resonates across spiritual traditions.

    • In Taoism, the Tao Te Ching begins with: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” Like YHWH, the Tao is beyond words, a force that underlies all existence. Tao actually means “The Way,” which I find quite fascinating.
    • Hinduism speaks of Brahman, the supreme universal spirit, the ultimate reality that cannot be fully defined, yet is the essence of all things. The sacred sound Om is often said to contain the vibration of all existence, much like YHWH as breath.
    • Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, often chants the Divine name Hu in meditation. Hu is the breath of life, the ungraspable presence of Allah, known not through intellect, but through experience.

    Reclaiming the Sacred Mystery

    So what happens when we move beyond “God” as a mere label and return to the mystery to be experienced? What if we stopped trying to define the Divine with rigid words and instead sought it in the breath, in the motion, in the silence, and in the spaces between?

    I think about my friends who have walked away from religion, many of them artists, musicians, and punks who reject anything that smells like control or dogma. I get it. I’m there too. Especially with the current state of the church in America. But what if the problem isn’t the Divine itself, but the way it’s been packaged and sold? What if the real thing was never meant to be locked inside churches and creeds, but was as close as your next breath?

    To speak the Name of God is to breathe. To seek the Name of God is to live life to its fullest and most abundant.

    In the words of Father Richard Rohr: “I remind people that there is no Islamic, Christian, or Jewish way of breathing… The playing field is utterly leveled.” No one and no religion can control this spirit.

    This shatters identity politics and the idea that the Divine is exclusive to any certain people group. If you breathe, you’re in. Period.

    The Name that isn’t a Name is still speaking.

    Are you listening?

  • You never knew THIS about Valentine’s Day

    Is it just me or have Valentine’s Day products been on the shelves since like Christmas Eve? Let’s not even get started on the corporate consumerism of it all, because while true, that sounds draining and stressful. I want to talk little bit about real love. I’m sure all the retailers and date night spots would like you to believe that love is something you can buy.  Or at the very least, that you have to spend money to prove your love adequately. But we all know that love is one of those things that can’t be bought. Love can’t be defined. Love can never fully be expressed or contained. Artists, poets, philosophers, filmmakers and humans throughout all of history have tried to capture something that seems to be futile to the ineffability and infinity of love. Behind the candles, dessert menus, and manufactured romance this week lies an invitation to explore an eternal mystery:

    What is love?

    Like, really….what is it? And how do we begin to grasp its infinite depth?

    A Brief History of Valentine’s Day

    The origins of Valentine’s Day are hazy, and a bit jumbled together from history, legend, and myth. The most famous tale tells of St. Valentine, a priest in 3rd-century Rome. Emperor Claudius II had placed a ban on marriage for young soldiers. Our boy Valentine risking everything, he performed secret weddings, believing that love transcended law, empire, and even death. For this, he was put to death on February 14th, and his legacy grew into a celebration of love.

    But long before St. Valentine, around the same date in February was Lupercalia. Lupercalia was an ancient Roman festival of fertility, passion, and renewal. It was a time when love was understood as something untamed and primal, honestly maybe even a bit brutal at times. They saw love as a force woven into the very fabric of existence.

    From the earliest days of human history, love never seems to be merely sentimental or easy to capture with words.

    Love is…  Sacred.

    Esoteric.

    Transformative.

    It is the fire that has bound hearts, shattered oppression, and opened doorways to the divine throughout eternity.

    Ancient Wisdom on Love

    Traditions across the world have long understood love as more than an emotion and more than human attachment or pair bonding. Love is the gravitational force of our souls, the spiritual thread stitching all things together, the current that carries us back home.

    • The Taoist Perspective: Love is the dance of Yin and Yang, the interplay of opposites. It is not about possession or control but balance. Allowing the other to be fully themselves while remaining fully yourself. Love is not static. Love is found in the flow, in surrendering to the harmony of existence.

    • Hindu Teachings: The Bhagavad Gita speaks of bhakti, a love that transcends the physical and becomes devotion to the divine in all things. To love another fully is to see God within them, to recognize that every face is a reflection of the infinite. Namaste.

    • Jewish Mysticism (Kabbalah): In Kabbalah, love (ahavah) is not just an emotion but an act of giving, a channel through which divine energy flows. The more we give of ourselves, the more we reflect the divine essence that permeates all things. Love expands the soul, dissolving the illusion of separateness from God.

    Jesus and the Way of Love

    Jesus did not just teach love; he embodied it. And not the pretty pink love of overpriced greeting cards, but a love so radical, so boundary-shattering, that it turned the world upside down.

    • “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is not just an ethical rule, it is a deeper truth about our connection to one another. The boundaries we perceive between our selves, “me” and “them”,  are not as solid as they seem. When we love another, we reflect that love within ourselves. When we harm another, we diminish something within our own soul.

    • “Love your enemies.” Jesus knew that love isn’t about being deserving. It isn’t earned. It is not a transaction. Love simply is. A force that flows freely, without condition, because love is the very nature of God. And aligning ourselves with that spirit, living in this way can heal ourselves and those around us. 

    • “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” I truly don’t think that this is merely about physical sacrifice, but about something far deeper: the surrender of the self we construct, the one bound by ego and illusion. The one that sees itself as separate. To love is to release that false self and step into the greater reality of connection. It is letting go of the masks we wear, the pride that separates us, and the fear that keeps us from recognizing the deep river that flows through us all. 

    Love as the Bridge to the Divine

    Love is not something we possess. It possesses us. It moves through us like breath, like light, like the pulse of the universe itself.

    To love deeply is to see beyond the illusion of separateness. To love fully is to recognize the divine in every face, in every moment, in every breath. Love is not a reward. It is not a prize to be won. It is not earned. Love simply is. It is the essence from which we come and to which we return.

    An Invitation to Love More Fully

    This Valentine’s Day, go beyond the surface-level expressions of love. I’m hoping that we expand our love beyond romance to the stranger, to the enemy, to the earth itself. To love with the reckless abandon of mystics, the unwavering devotion of sages, and the boundless generosity of the Source from which all love flows.

    Whisper a blessing to someone in silence. Speak love into the world, even to those who may not return it. Reject fear. Love your enemies. See the divine in the ordinary… in the eyes of a friend, in the face of a stranger, in the reflection staring back at you in the mirror.

    Let love not be a fleeting feeling, but the very path that leads us home.

    Because in the end, love is not something we give or receive.

    Love is who we are.

    Love is who I Am.