Love's Companions: Patience, Obedience, Humility

Love never stands alone but has her companions all the true solid virtues, because all the virtues have life from charity's love...And among love’s companions is patience, the very marrow of love and the clear sign of whether the soul is in grace and is loving in truth or not. This is why charity, the mother, has given obedience patience as a sister and has so joined the two together that the one can never be lost without the other. Either you have both or you have neither.
 
Obedience has a wet nurse, true humility, and the soul is as obedient as she is humble, and as humble as she is obedient.

St. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue

This Sweet Word

"This sweet Word jousted with His arms upon the wood of the most holy Cross, death fighting a tournament with life and life with death: so that by His death He destroyed our death, and to give us life He sacrificed the life of His body. So then with love He has drawn us to Him, and has overcome our malice with His benignity, in so much that every heart should be drawn to Him: since greater love one cannot show-and this He himself said-than to give one's life for one's friend. And if He commended the love which gives one's life for one's friend, what then shall we say of that most burning and perfect love which gave its life for its foe? For we through sin had become foes of God. Oh, sweet and loving Word, who with love hast found Thy flock once more, and with love hast given Thy life for them, and hast brought them back to Thy fold, restoring to them the Grace which they had lost!"

-St. Catherine of Siena, in her letter to Pope Gregory XI