Her refusal never actually became an issue, since she and Jenny's father got a perfectly legitimate reason not to attend anyway (namely, his ordination as a priest being scheduled at the same time as our ritual was to begin). And I think her problem was with attending a decidedly non-Christian ritual. Overall, she is a quite nice woman, and steering clear of some topics of discussion when she's around is no big hardship.

This wasn't the only Christian funeral I've been to, only the first one since I started working as a priest. And the major flaw (IMO, and apart from all the things I don't like about Christianity in general, of course) was the near-total lack of attention to the grieving people left behind. The ceremony as it was might have made a decent middle third of a proper ritual, but standing by itself as it did it severely lacked in several respects.