ABSTRACT
How do we learn to die? We live in a world that panics at this question and turns away. Other civilisations before ours looked squarely at death. They mapped the passage for both the community and the individual. They infused the fulfilment of destiny with a richness of meaning. Never perhaps have our relationships with death been as barren as they are in this modern spiritual desert, in which our rush to a mere existence carries us past all sense of mystery. We do not know that we are parching the essence of life of one of its wellsprings.
