Martha, Mary and the Better Part

Source: At Jesus' Feet, Nathan Greene

Two Dimensions
Today's Gospel reading from Luke, tells the account of Jesus' encounter with Martha and Mary, sisters of Lazarus and close friends of our Lord who lived in Bethany. The two sisters represent "the two dimensions of the spiritual life." (Ignatius Study Bible). Martha represents the active life of Christian service, while Mary signifies the life of contemplation, of prayer. In the story, Martha is portrayed as hustling about serving the guests, while Mary remains at Christ's feet listening. Martha is agitated that Mary is not helping and complains to Jesus. He responds by saying. “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.” (Luke 10: 41-42)

Balanced Spiritual Life
I don't believe that Christ is telling Martha that service is bad, but instead he is telling her that the contemplative life is better. We would all do well to have a balance spiritual life of both contemplation and service. According to St. Josemaria:

Martha has come to be, as it were, the symbol of the active life, and Mary that of the contemplative life. However, for most Christians, called as they are to sanctify themselves in the middle of the world, action and contemplation cannot be regarded as two opposite ways of practising the Christian faith: an active life forgetful of union with God is useless and barren; but an apparent life of prayer which shows no concern for apostolate and the sanctification of ordinary things also fails to please God. The key lies in being able to combine these two lives, without either harming the other. Close union between action and contemplation can be achieved in very different ways, depending on the specific vocation each person is given by God. 

Far from being an obstacle, work should be a means and an occasion for a close relationship with our Lord, which is the most important thing in our life. 

Following this teaching of the Lord, the ordinary Christian should strive to attain an integrated life--an intense life of piety and external activity, orientated towards God, practised out of love for Him and with an upright intention, which expresses itself in apostolate, in everyday work, in doing the duties of one's state in life. "You must understand now more clearly that God is calling you to serve Him in and from the ordinary, material and secular activities of human life. He waits for us every day, in the laboratory, in the operating room, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fields, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work. Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each of you to discover it [...]. There is no other way. Either we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or else we shall never find Him. That is why I can tell you that our age needs to give back to matter and to the most trivial occurrences and situations their noble and original meaning. It needs to restore them to the service of the Kingdom of God, to spiritualize them, turning them into a means and an occasion for a continuous meeting with Jesus Christ (St. J. Escriva, Conversations, 114).

The Better Part
For further reading on the "better part," I recommend reading the Catholic Spiritual Direction blog hosted by the author of the book The Better Part. Here's a sample of today's reflections from The Better Part app which explains how we can tell when our spiritual lives are out of balance:

The crucial sign that we may be following Martha’s footsteps a little too closely is a waning life of prayer. When we skimp on our prayer life, on that precious time that we spend, as Mary did, “at the Lord’s feet listening to him speaking,” we need to stop and check our spiritual vital signs. Maybe we have let ourselves become so “distracted with all the serving” that we have forgotten why we should be serving at all. (The Better Part, 188)