In Martin McDonagh’s movie In Bruges, two London hit men are sent to the eponymous city in Belgium after a job gone wrong. Ray, played by Colin Farrell, accidentally killed a child when he was dispatched merely to kill a priest. Their shadowy crime boss orders them to lie low at a bed and breakfast in sleepy, medieval Bruges, the last place anyone would ever look.

On one of the interminable days spent waiting on a call from the boss, Ray and his fellow hit man Ken (Brendan Gleeson) visit an art museum. Bosch’s triptych The Last Judgment captures their attention. They identify Heaven and Hell in Bosch’s apocalyptic dreamscape, but Ray wonders about “the in-betweeny one,” Purgatory. “Do you believe in all that?” Ray asks Ken nervously. He knows he’s committed a terrible sin, even for a professional criminal. He doesn’t know what will happen to him. He’s trapped in Bruges while he waits to find out. The great conceit of the movie emerges: Bruges is Ray’s Purgatory.

Let’s set aside the apparent theological inaccuracy—Catholics believe souls in Purgatory will definitely, not maybe, proceed to Heaven—because Bruges is actually an apt comparison. It’s a city outside time and space, at least as we usually experience it. Its streets and squares would likely be as recognizable to a fifteenth-century cloth merchant as to last summer’s tourists. Winter’s short days and perpetually overcast skies make it impossible to perceive the hour. During the day, rain-glazed cobbles and still canal waters reflect the sky so perfectly that the horizon seems to disappear. In the long black winter nights, the moon is as clear on the water as in the sky. The canals wind around the city on a mysterious route fraught with dead ends, shrouded in mist. The streets are a medieval maze, curving or terminating abruptly, so that you can rarely see more than one hundred yards ahead. Like the tourists who flock here, Ken finds Bruges’s suspension of time enchanting, a “fairy tale.” Ray finds it unsettling. He spends the movie calling it a “shithole” and trying, unsuccessfully, to leave.

My husband and I visited Bruges in November. We booked the trip in the fog following our third miscarriage, when the only truth clear to us was that we couldn’t face Thanksgiving. The cheesy resort in Cancún where we honeymooned would be full of celebrating Americans. And plane tickets to the warmer shores of Europe—Portugal, Spain, southern Italy—were unjustifiably expensive with only two weeks of notice. But there’s a Belgian restaurant on our street in Pennsylvania called Café Bruges. We like the frites and the mussels and the beer, and it turns out Bruges is only a few hours from Paris by train. Why not?

In my experience, which is getting to be extensive, the better part of losing a pregnancy is killing time. You wait for the results of a blood test or ultrasound, and you wait for the doctor to call you and tell you what it means. You wait for a follow-up test to confirm what you already know. After the initial shock, the appointments and blood draws and ultrasounds, the calls from perky nurses asking, incredibly, How are you today?, and after the pain and the blood, which is to say after this whole process which may itself take weeks to complete—you wait. You wait for your body to heal, you wait for your fertility to return. You wait perhaps five or six weeks for your next cycle, or the next after that, to start “trying again.” If your doctor suspects an underlying problem, you might wait for more tests or procedures or treatments. You might be on a waiting list, in fact, alongside other waiting women. It might be months or years long.

So we killed time in Bruges. We found a hotel with a vacancy ten minutes from the market square on foot. The shower leaked, but the breakfasts were long and leisurely, filled with double espressos and soft cheeses and cured meats and other pleasures forbidden during my short-lived pregnancy. We criss-crossed the streets and canals in the cold steady drizzle and got pleasantly lost in the winding alleys. We stopped in cafés and market stalls for glühwein, trippels, lambics, waffles. We’d watched In Bruges before we left and were pleased to find that the city, having held onto its character for half a millennium before the movie, was pretty much the same sixteen years later, too, and we recognized many landmarks, such as the towering belfry, whose chiming on the quarter-hour marked time in the undifferentiated gray fog. We welcomed Bruges’s misty timelessness. We weren’t running from the police, just from reality, and in Bruges our waiting was as painless as possible.

While the movie is full of religious gestures—in addition to the whole Purgatory thing, for example, the hit men stay in an inn called De Rozenkransje (“the Rosary”) owned by a serene pregnant woman named Marie, at Christmas—the actual Bruges is dense with Catholic history, from its very origins. In the ninth century, when a Frankish count built a fortress on the ruins of Roman fortifications where Bruges is today, he included a chapel for the relics of Saint Donatian of Reims, who is still the city’s patron.

The fortress offered Low Country civilians protection from marauding Northmen, so a settlement grew around it. Then, in 1134, a great storm knocked open a fifteen-kilometer channel connecting Bruges to the North Sea. This channel, Het Zwin, also known as the Golden Inlet, created by an improbable act of God, enabled Bruges to become a major center of commerce. Through the channel, its merchants exported wool and cloth and traded with the Portuguese, Genovese, and Hanseatic League. They opened what is likely the world’s first stock exchange in 1309. The Golden Inlet gave Bruges its Golden Age and enriched its Flemish Catholics.

And what did the people of Bruges do with all this wealth? They built. They built a Gothic church for Our Lady and a Romanesque cathedral for Saint Donatian, now known as the Cathedral of Our Savior, Saint Salvator. They built a basilica for a relic of the Holy Blood of Jesus Christ, brought back from the Second Crusade and processed through the streets once a year to this day, on the Feast of the Ascension. They built abbeys, monasteries, and a beguinage. They built a hospital in honor of Saint John, and attached a monastery and convent for the convenience of the staff. Bruges’s prosperous families were great art appreciators as well as Catholics, and Bruges attracted painters such as Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling. Our Lady’s Church has the only Michelangelo known to have left Italy during his lifetime, a serene Madonna and Child.

But the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. The miraculous channel silted up around 1500, and Bruges’s Golden Age ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. Antwerp’s port was more resilient, more permanent, so the center of Flemish culture shifted east. Having a past but no future, no industrial capacity, and no strategic importance protected Bruges from destruction during the world wars. Much of what Bruggians created—the bridges and cathedrals and almshouses and altarpieces—still exists. You can go see it all. You can light candles and cry in every impeccably preserved medieval church in Flanders, if you paid your ten or twenty euro, and no one will bother you. The other tourists will act like you aren’t even there.

Catholics believe that Purgatory has a certain outcome but not a certain timeline. A soul’s state of waiting and suffering will end, but we don’t know when. We don’t know what that time will feel like as it passes, whether a minute will last a century. For a soul in Purgatory, as for those longing for a child, and for the impetuous, impatient Ray, the question of when could feel as momentous as whether. It might not feel like a state of certainty at all.

Ray and Ken’s waiting period in Bruges concludes halfway through the movie, when the boss, Harry, finally calls. He informs Ken that his next job is to eliminate Ray. Ken, maybe inspired by his veneration of the relic of the Holy Blood or his reflections on Bosch’s Last Judgment, refuses. He ultimately sacrifices his own life to attempt to save Ray from Harry’s wrath.

In the climactic scene, which takes place “outside the pointy building”—the Church of Our Lady—Harry, having already shot Ken, finally shoots Ray, too. As the medics load Ray into the ambulance, his characteristic cynicism and self-loathing dissolves into hope: hope that he might yet confess to the parents of the child he killed; hope that he will somehow make it out of Bruges; hope that he will live.

The loss of a pregnancy can rob a person of hope for the future. The future, after all, makes you older. The future carries you deeper into the maw of infertility treatments, which you may want and also fear and dread. The future carries you further away from that glimmering moment of hope, the positive pregnancy test, that faint line like a tiny whispering sound in your quiet house early one morning. You can’t return to the past, you can’t stop the future, and you can’t escape the waiting. But you can go to Bruges.

This essay appears in the Lent 2025 issue of The Lamp.