There is a tale told by Australian aborigines about the beginning. Once there was no death in the worId. But one day Purukupali the hunter returned home to find his son Jinini dead from the heat of the sun. Grieving, he picked up the body of his child and walked into the sea to drown himself. As he stepped into the swirling waters, he shouted that because his son had died, so must everyone else from that day on. And so it has been ever since.

Purukupali was one of the original people of the worId. Just before him had been Mudungkala, the original mother who rose out of the ground with her children, crawled about making hills and rivers, and decreed that the bare ground should grow green things for food and for creatures to hide in. And so it has been ever since.

Stories such as these may represent the earliest human attempts to express and come to terms with the great mysteries of life such as where the grass and the rivers come from and why we must all die. For the last 40,000 years or so, We humans have been engaged in an adventure of self-discovery. Over and over again we have discerned a dimension of mystery in our existence, in the fact of life and death, in the patterns of love and indifference and anger, in the regularity of pain, and the surprise of joy. In all this there is mystery--why it is so, what promise or threat it holds, how we can deal with it.

Few things reveal as much about us humans as the story of how we have responded to the dimension of mystery. That story, for the most part, has been the story of religion.