Reflection for February 2

  When they were gathering the tools to go to the village for the customary gravediggers’ drinks, Ruttledge asked Patrick Ryan, ‘Does it make a great difference that his head lies in the west?’ ‘It makes every difference, lad, or it makes no difference.’
  ‘In what way?’
  ‘You should know, lad,’ he said…
  ‘The world is full of things I don’t know,’ Ruttledge said.
  ‘He sleeps with his head in the west… so that when he wakes he may face the rising sun.’ Looking from face to face and drawing himself to his full height, Patrick Ryan stretched his arm dramatically towards the east. ‘We look to the resurrection of the dead.’
  The shadow from the abbey now stretched beyond the open grave, but the rose-window in the west pulsed with light, sending out wave after wave of carved shapes of light towards that part of the sky where the sun would rise (That They May Face the Rising Sun, a novel by John McGahern).