A November meditation on purgatory, the womb of God’s mercy, and being born again.
November is the month the Church turns, gently, towards her dead. We keep the feast of All Souls, we light candles, we write names on lists for Mass. It is a season that makes room for grief and refuses to hurry us past it, for grief is not a failure of faith. When Lazarus died, Jesus wept. Love grieves; that is what love does when it loses.
St Paul names the Christian difference with great tenderness: we grieve, he says, but “not as those who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Yet Christian hope is more than the quiet certainty that this is not the end. It is closer to expectancy — the blessed expectation of a household waiting for a birth. Grief and expectation, it turns out, can share the same heart.
There is a word in Hebrew that opens this up. The word for God’s mercy, rachamim, is born from the word rechem — the womb. When Scripture reaches to describe the Lord’s tender compassion (see Exodus 34:6), it reaches for the image of a mother carrying her child. God’s mercy is womb-love. To be held in that mercy is to be carried in the vulnerable dark — protected, nourished, and gently brought to term.
What if this is how we might see purgatory: not a punishment to dread, but a womb? Not a prison, but a gestation. The soul who dies still unfinished in love is not cast out; she is carried — enfolded in the rachamim of God, tenderly brought to the fullness of life she could not reach on her own. The purifying is not God’s severity but God’s nurture: the last patient labour of Love, bringing a life to birth. Purgatory, seen so, is not the withholding of mercy but a fresh and deeper experience of it.
Surely this is the answer to Nicodemus, who came to Jesus by night and could not understand. “Unless you are born again,” the Lord told him, “you cannot see the kingdom of God.” Taking it literally, Nicodemus asked the question we might smile at and yet secretly feel: “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb?” (John 3). The answer is yes — not the womb that bore you once, but the womb of divine mercy, which bears you into glory. To die in Christ is to be carried toward that second birth: born again, born from above, into the Kingdom.
Seen this way, our grieving changes key. The sorrow is real — Jesus wept — but it becomes a kind of waiting. “A woman in labour has pain,” Jesus said, “but when her child is born she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy” (John 16:21). Even creation, Paul writes, groans in the pains of childbirth, awaiting its birth into glory (Romans 8:22). Our mourning is not the end of the story; it is the labour before a birth we cannot yet see.
So grieve in a hope that is expectant. Pray for your departed loved ones not as the lost but as those being carried, even now, to term — held in the womb of God’s mercy, being brought to the fullness of life. Speak their names; offer a Mass; let your tears fall. And let the grief carry, underneath it, the quiet astonishment of a birth being prepared. What looks to us like an ending is, in the rachamim of God, a beginning.
The ones we have loved and lost are not gone. They are being born. And so, in God’s good mercy, are we.
This fortnight’s practice offers a simple November Examen of remembrance — a way to pray for and with your beloved dead, entrusting them to the womb of God’s mercy. Download our ebook here.