LIKE most people, I take pleasure in watching the sunset. I enjoy the golden tinge it gives the western sky, and all the deepening oranges and reds that colour the clouds, the sheer variety of tone and intensity, and the changes in colour which come so gradually that we are always missing the precise moment of change, but always seeing and enjoying the effect. I tried to get some of my feel for sunsets into the opening of a sonnet, “Westward”:

We’re looking west to where our setting sun,
Already out of sight, looks back at us, to fling
His dying splendour to these clouds. They burn
With borrowed gold and crimson, not their own
Like strips of silk torn from his royal robe,
These flags of hope left by our solar king,
Who sinks for us below the dark horizon
That he might yet encompass all this globe.

Chesterton observes somewhere that, since the Copernican revolution, we should really all speak of “earth-turn” rather than sunset. I have tried that thought experiment. Facing the sunset rather than thinking of the sun sinking in the west, I have tried to imagine, instead, the earth hurtling backwards, plunging vertiginously into the desolation of its own shadow.

But the imagination cannot sustain such a thought for long, and I return to the old model of a sun that rises and sets around a still and stable earth. That image of a world plunging backwards into its own shadow might be more an emblem of the way the geopolitical world feels at the moment than a merely astronomical account of rotation. But, whether we speak of earth-turn or sunset, we know that the darkness is only temporary, that “heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

What we need, as we endure the night, is, quite literally, a “re-orientation”. We need to turn around, to stop gazing at what we’ve lost, and turn, instead, towards the horizon of the morning, the place and sign of the resurrection. John Donne expressed it all so well in his poem “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward”:

Hence is’t, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;

This is one reason that churches are oriented towards the east. They look not only to Jerusalem, but also to the dawn of resurrection. So, the octet of my sonnet “Westward” faced west, but the sextet, with which it concludes, makes the volta, or turn, and looks to the east:

He leaves us with the promise of his rising
For all we face the west of his decline
Already somewhere else are voices praising
As on the east they glimpse a kindled line.
His setting is a herald of the morn,
We watch the sunset, but we tread the dawn.