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Notes -
While I'm no monarchist, this is the principle that undergirds my belief in ordered worship, and especially structured, traditional weddings and funerals. The exact last thing I want when I'm choosing to make a lifelong commitment of love and sacrifice, or when I'm mourning someone who has died, is someone getting creative or trying to break the mould. When I get married, I don't want to have an ersatz commitment to someone, maybe, according to whatever private assumptions of relationship we have -- I want to get married according to a known mould with known obligations, duties, rights, and privileges.
And this is even more true with funerals -- when I'm grieving, I want to be upheld in a shared worldview that gives meaning to my grief and reassures that, despite the intensity of the loss, the world is still moving, and life will go on. And not only go on, but go on normally, that this death is not unique, that it does not shatter everything, that others have been here before, felt the very feelings, heard the very words, and listened to the very songs, that I'm hearing. I want to be carried along by a funeral, not pandered to; reassured by the very banality and normality of it that life will, some day, go back to being banal and normal, which is the cry of every mourner.
If I were to make a defense of liturgical religion and sacred ceremony on sociological and psychological grounds, it would be that.
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