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.
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.
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.
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.
