The scriptures today demonstrate that divine inspiration begins in the womb. Psalm 139 says, “truly you have formed my inmost being, you knit me in my mother’s womb,” and in Isaiah, “the Lord has spoken who has formed me as his servant from the womb.”
Yet as adults we can tend to overlook our divinely inspired desires to accommodate the expectations and norms of society.
Elizabeth and Zacharias, divinely inspired, avoided following the crowd, and used the name John for their son. John the Baptist remained true to this divine plan beginning in the womb until his death. How then do we return to God’s divinely inspired plan that begins in the womb?
Perhaps the recipe for divine inspiration comes from the “Three Degrees of Humility” meditation in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius The first degree is to do nothing that would cut me off from God. The second is to seek a life of detachment, and the third is to love the poor Christ. (Exercises #165, 166, 167).
True humility connects us to Jesus, revealing that —although unworthy—each of us is part of a divinely-inspired plan
—Matthew Lieser, S.J. is a Jesuit scholastic studying philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.