The Holy Spirit says:
“Write. And let it be a reply to the foolish deductions of some. The long silence (eighteen months) is a reply, as are the new words.
“The long silence is a reply, a reply telling your detractors that in you there is not a desire to write or not to write, but only a desire to obey God. If He speaks, you write. If He is silent, you do not write. For you are not a counterfeiter of extraordinary things. For you are not a madwoman who takes words and visions deriving from delirium to be supernatural words and supernatural visions. You are the instrument, the spokesman. And an instrument is inactive until the artificer takes it into his hands to have it carry out a task. And a spokesman has no voice until the Voice fills it with Itself so that he will spread it around the world. This is what you are, and nothing else.
“And the new words, after the long silence, are a reply, to tell the truth to the blind with their eyes covered by the scales of their carnality, who see as their thought, which is not good, sees, not, indeed, as reality is, for they are blind. They see the outside and do not know what is occurring between the Divine Spirit and the spirit of the servant of God. They see the apparent silence, but cannot penetrate into the divine motives for that silence, for the carnal man cannot penetrate with his opaque heaviness into the mysteries of the Light made Word.
“I now say that to respond to these fools I will speak after so much silence. But since I am God, and God is Goodness, I will not force you, a victim consuming yourself increasingly. I will adapt my Word to your physical possibilities, thereby giving a new lesson to those sinning against charity and justice, and thus against God, who do not adapt their actions towards you, a sick woman, with charity and justice and sin against the twofold love which the ancient Law and the Incarnate Word proclaimed to be the first commandment, without which the others cannot be true and living, and the formal, literal modes of worship are vain and false and dead remains. For what constitutes divine life, what divinizes even a smile and makes it the object of future reward, is love. Only love.
“Not without divine counsel the lessons halted at verse four of the eighth chapter to the Romans and resumed at the fifth verse of the same chapter after eighteen months. Up to the fourth verse there was reference to you, that live in the spirit, and to those like you. From the fifth verse to the seventh they are spoken of. And with this point the lesson resumed, just right for the present hour. Even the winking of an eye is governed by God’s Wisdom.”390
390 We omit over one hundred handwritten pages, dated January 8 - June 2, 1950, containing twelve of the Lessons on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, as well as the next notebook in its entirety, dated June 16 - November 16, 1950, containing the remaining ten Lessons.