It is appalling to contemplate just how desperately sad, pathetic, and nihilistically vacuous this is.
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To have no greater access to the realm of meaning, hope, transcendence—no more resonant framework to give a final context to a loved one's mortal remains—than a kitschy theme-park ride with animatronic ghosts owned and operated by a mass media and entertainment conglomerate.
As I've said in the past regarding the Satrean nausea with which the very idea of a wholly secular memorial service fills me: Give me literally anything—give me heathen ritual with blood sacrifices to pagan gods, or even a fig leaf of pious pretense—rather than that.
I've said before that I believe the big things in life—birth, marriage, death (our own, but even more the death of a loved one)—are too big for us without the power of ritual to shape experience in a narrative of meaning. Ritual is a human necessity.
A big part of the power of ritual, though, is its grounding in tradition and communal experience. To connect me to a larger world than meaning—to something bigger than myself—ritual must speak to me of a world of experience beyond my own shallow resources.
For Catholics, the funeral Mass and Christian burial links us to 2,000 years of saints and faithful, to Jesus, to hope of resurrection. For Hindus, cremation and scattering of ashes invokes a heritage of gurus, swamis, yogis, the cycle of reincarnation, hope of final release.
Now, in our increasingly post-everything culture, lacking pastors, priests, saints, or mystics, it seems some people have no better candidate for guardians of divine mysteries than Disney Imagineers.
