I have been a Martha all my life, except once, when I tried to be a Mary and was directed back to work in the kitchen. My personality—attention to detail, preference for staying in the background, doing my duty no matter what, dedicated to order, uneasiness in company—makes me a good Martha, but I also worry about what kind of life I am modeling for my children and grandchildren, and, of course, I not-so-secretly wish I could be a Mary, the kind of person who easily lets go of the relatively unimportant things and the busyness of life for a higher goal. So I always felt chastened by today’s Gospel.

Venerable (soon to be beatified) Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s explication of this Gospel was, therefore, a revelation to me. Martha, the active, and Mary, the contemplative, aren’t different types of women: they are the two complementary parts of each soul. Each part needs the other in order to be rightly developed and form a full human being, a full woman, a complete mother who models how these sides of us work together for the good. What Jesus warns against is getting caught up in the world such that we turn away from the better part of ourselves and fear being alone with the Lord.

The poet Dante dramatizes this essential union of our two sides in his Purgatorio in the souls’ ascent up the mountain of Purgatory as they learn to become holy. The long climb to holiness necessitates using both parts of us. Dante the pilgrim lives the active life each day as he strives alongside the souls in purgatory to work—and work hard—at cleansing themselves of sin and learning to practice virtue. He spends each night as they do (in rest, prayer, and reflection) as he discusses and understands ever more deeply his relationship to God.

Our work each day, our Martha time, is our living out the beatitudes, our faith in action, and our daily “Yes, Lord, I believe.” It is how we minister to God through our ministering to those in our care. This daily practice is based on those cardinal virtues on which our families and communities depend: prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. To teach our children when to act, to act justly, to moderate our actions, and to do the good with great courage is an incredibly difficult challenge in our world, but one we do every hour with the grace of God.

After a hard day or in the midst of difficulties, we also need the grace of Mary’s time, the contemplative side. For a moment, five minutes, or an hour, we can put aside our busyness and worries and rest in the Lord, like Mary, contemplating and adoring him. We say to him, “I love you,” and we let God minister to us. In these moments, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity govern our souls. We are alone with him spiritually and are strengthened and fed by his presence or his word, but always his enduring and overflowing love for each of us.

Mary’s part requires true humility to see our smallness and dependence and to open ourselves as widely and deeply as possible to accept what he is offering us, a gift greater than we can possibly conceive. Mary’s is indeed the better part, but it is not the whole. God still asks us to be Marthas, living out by word and deed and passing on to our children the gift of love given in this moment.

A second Gospel that can be chosen for this feast shows the two parts of us coming together and what this union can accomplish. Martha and Mary both come to Jesus, Martha professing her faith in him as the Christ, the Son of God, and Mary weeping in her sorrow and love for her dead brother. The result is the raising of Lazarus, and God’s grace to lift us out of ourselves and up to him. He always listens, takes us wholly into his loving heart, active and contemplative together, and fulfills the promise of our resurrection and life eternal with him.