As of this fall, I’ve been going through catechism after spending 15 years at services with my Greek Orthodox husband and our baptized children. What’s been moving me most lately, that has sprung from this experience, is the idea of our innate human longing to reach for something unknowable — something just beyond the grasp of understanding, but deeply felt all the same.

This longing is not unique to Christianity, or even religion in general. So many of the ideas I’m learning in Orthodoxy echo things I’ve felt in other places over the years. When I studied devotional Indian dance long ago, I learned that the heart of Bhakti is this same yearning for the divine — the dance between the Lover and the Beloved, Krishna and Radha. The movements express love and joy, but also the ache of separation, the tension of longing, and the sweetness of union.

In Christian catechism, we’re given a similar image: Christ as Bridegroom, humanity as Bride. In Buddhism, that longing becomes the soul’s search for enlightenment — Nibbana. In Sufism, they call it shawq — the burning desire for Allah that consumes the seeker until devotion becomes love.

It’s striking how often this thread appears across faiths — this longing to return to something vast and precious that we somehow remember but can’t quite touch. I keep picturing droplets leaping up from the ocean — each one for a moment believing it’s separate, unique, alone — before falling back into the sea. Does the droplet remember it was once part of the ocean? Does it long to return, even while it’s suspended in the air, unsure of what it’s missing? And when it merges again — when its smallness disappears into something infinite — does it remember who it once was?

I think about this a lot at my bench. When I melt down scrap metal, and old broken pieces become something new. When I recycle wax for new injection molds. When I pour silicone over seedpods to memorialize their shape for casting. There’s something sacred in that cycle — dissolving, reshaping, return. We humans fight so hard to preserve our sense of self, to push back against endings. Yet somewhere deep down, we long to reconnect with something so vast, so much bigger than ourselves, that it transfigures and obliterates us.

I feel that paradox every time I set a diamond — knowing its carbon atoms are the same as the ones in my own bones. Knowing that the iron in sapphires also runs through my blood. We come from the same source. We go back to it. Maybe that’s what this longing really is — a remembering of connection, and that the perceived separateness of our Selves is a momentary illusion, before we fall back into the sea.