I recently attended two funerals which, while making passing references to Christianity, were more cultish new-age productions than anything else. The first was conducted in a Diocese of Niagara church. The priest, whose studious efforts to avoid mentioning God were subverted only by his being compelled to do so by the funeral liturgy, buoyed by years of theological training, concentrated his potent expository talent on how the deceased would live on in each of our hearts.

The second was conducted by a lady cleric of indeterminate denomination; she did mention God and Jesus but only as an afterthought when not waxing eloquent on the cosmic life force in which, apparently, we are all adrift as we journey together, wafting through the spiritual ether like itinerant milkweed seeds never able to settle long enough to germinate.

Neither mentioned the resurrection of Jesus or our hope of resurrection. Without the resurrection we are still in our sins, there is no reconciliation with God, no hope and no coherent meaning to our lives.

So how does the contemporary pagan gain comfort after losing a loved one? By having the ashes of the dearly departed tattooed into his skin; how else?

Trish Rodgers filled a small bottle cap with her dead aunt’s ashes and emptied it into a vial of black ink. In her apartment, the tattoo artist used the combination of human remains and tattoo pigment to draw the outline of a rose into her cousin’s shoulder.

At that point, this was a practice that only tattoo artists used amongst themselves, Ms. Rodgers says. But since that evening in 2008, it has garnered attention of sociologists across the world and Canadian tattoo parlours are seeing requests for the procedure grow.