There is more to the mystery of being and the human soul than natural virtue. We are all called to something far greater, a love not of this world, but a love—the will that a thing be—that is the source from which matter receives being.
To understand this love, consider the example of Mother Teresa of Calcutta kneeling in a filthy gutter as she attends to a dying beggar.
Within that act of love there are two actors, not just Mother Teresa of Calcutta. In that act Mother Teresa was possessed of much visible, beautiful virtue, something we should learn from and model.
But the other actor in that love was the dying beggar who lacked visible natural virtue. All that he possessed was suffering and emptiness.
Emptiness to our eyes, perhaps, but not to God: For the act of love in which Mother Teresa participated was not initiated by her. Rather, it was initiated by the suffering and emptiness of the beggar, in whom God dwelt not by any virtue in the beggar, but in his emptiness. That beggar gave Mother Teresa her vocation to love. Mother Teresa's role was merely to respond.
The beggar's act was to suffer defect, whether in health or material goods or character; which act of defect suffered was not the beggar's own, but was performed by God directly, indwelling in the person suffering, since such defect is not willed by the one who suffers; and such defect in the end is no less God's will than good health and wealth and virtue: because in the end, the good that God wills is composed from the interplay of perfection and defect; and the good that God wills would not be, but for the existence of both.
But since the act of defect suffered is by the the direct action of God indwelling, whereas perfection and virtue are on the part of the creature, the suffering of defect is the higher order of God's will.
Thus it is that, in the order of heaven, the beggar holds the higher place than Mother Teresa, because in his emptiness and littleness and lastness and suffering he was nothing of himself, leaving himself free to be wholly employed by God as an instrument that gave Mother Teresa her being: as such, the beggar was an instrument of the love which is God, and by which our being is. The beggar was the prior actor in the divine love he participated in with Mother Teresa.