Jesus came to Nain at that critical moment, not by chance, but in answer to the widow’s prayers, and in order to declare his “almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity” (1).  And that Divine mercy and pity has been shown no less for the spiritually dead than for the physically dead.  Of this the history of the Church provided a famous parallel in the conversion of St Augustine.  

His mother, Monica, a holy Christian widow, had the poignant grief of seeing her only son reject the Christian Faith and abandon himself to a loose and pagan life.  As he has written in his Confessions, “…thou didst ‘stretch forth thy hand from above’ and didst draw up my soul out of that profound darkness because my mother, thy faithful one, wept to thee on my behalf more than mothers are accustomed to weep for the bodily deaths of their children.  For by the light of the faith and spirit which she received from thee, she saw that I was dead.  And thou didst hear her, O Lord, thou didst hear her and despised not her tears when, pouring down, they watered the earth under her eyes in every place where she prayed.  Thou didst truly hear her” (2).