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‘God-directed’ Life Brings Sister Barbara Lux to Southern Illinois

Story and photo by LIZ QUIRIN
Messenger editor

Realizing she wanted to be a sister from the time she was a child, Sister Barbara Lux, sscm, joined the Servants of the Holy Heart of Mary at the age of 37. This year, in her early 60s, she celebrates 25 years in the order.

When she looks back at her life, she can see a series of events and what she calls “God moments” that led her to her present ministry with parolees and those on probation as well as counseling of adults and juveniles in a correctional facility in Harrisburg.

A Chicago native, Sister Lux said she loves southern Illinois and her home, with Sister Carol Karnitsky, sscm, in Carterville.

The path that led her here included a variety of jobs, including working in the corporate offices of Sears, marketing, and work with the Gabriel Richard Institute, a Catholic leadership program.

While she was working at the leadership program, she felt something was happening in her life, something important.
After her pastor gave a talk on vocations, she joked with a friend about “being a nun.” Her friend counseled her not to joke about it but to “pray about it.”

She said she “went into a panic. I started going to Mass every morning.” Another friend guessed she had been “thinking about becoming a nun.”

Where were her friends getting these ideas? She cried and decided to talk with her parish choir director, a sister who agreed to help her research five orders.

“It took me a month to work up the courage to write letters to them,” Sister Lux said.
From April of that year until August, she researched, wrote and spoke with orders of sisters.
“It was God-directed,” she said.

Sister Lux entered the convent on Jan. 6, 1983. It was the feast of the Epiphany, and she felt this had been her epiphany, her awakening to a life that had been directed by God for her since she was a child.

A part of her was sad that it had taken her so long to realize her dream, and a part of her was glad she had waited.
If she had joined the sisters in the mid-1960s when all of the tumult of the Second Vatican Council was emerging, she said she might have left. “I wonder if I would have stayed,” she said.

Her community was known for teaching and hospital work, she said. The community came from France in 1889 to Bourbonnais, Ill., near Kankakee, Ill.

This year her order celebrates its 150th anniversary of being founded in Paris, France in 1860. As a member of her provincial council, Sister Lux was given permission to go to Paris to visit places important in the order’s history.
As she moved from postulant to novice to vowed sister, Sister Lux spent time as a hospital chaplain and said she “loved it.”

Before entering the convent, Sister Lux remembers talking to a friend about where she would like to minister.
“I said I would like to work in a hospital or in prisons,” she said.

So far, she has done both. “It’s a thread running through my life,” she said, reflecting on her journey to join the sisters.
When she was in high school, she read a book called “Red Shoes for Nancy.” The book detailed the story of a diabetic and her “Christian witness to suffering. I was enthralled with that
story,” she said.

While she spent six of her early years as a chaplain, she said it wasn’t easy, remembering one time when she was asked to visit a woman in the hospital with cervical cancer. “She was close to my age,” Sister Lux said. That was difficult.

From the time she was small, she said, she was always “caught up in other people’s problems.”
These days, she is “caught up” in a program she helped design to give offenders — those on parole and on probation — a chance to change their lives for the better.

Men and women in the program meet regularly for a number of weeks to discuss issues that brought them into the correctional system. They spend a good deal of time talking about victims, who they are and how they are affected by crime.

Sister Lux brought the Awakenings program to the diocese after volunteering with a similar program in the Rockford diocese.

When Sister Lux came to this diocese, she began working with Catholic Social Services in Carbondale as a school counselor.

She told the CSS director, Mary Lou Loos about Awakenings, and together they met with local area judges. In 2006, with a diocesan grant and the backing of the judges in Jackson County, Sister Lux began the Awakenings program with adults.

In December of 2008 she launched the program in Williamson County. To date, 170 adults and 41 juveniles from the Illinois Youth Center in Harrisburg have completed an Awakenings program.

“At times it doesn’t seem real,” Sister Lux said. “At other times I’m overwhelmed that from a small beginning that all of a sudden, it’s really growing.”

Soon, Awakenings will be used in the federal justice system as well. “My hope is to continue doing this for a long time,” she said. The thrill with the program is seeing someone who has “a breakthrough and all of a sudden they wake up,” Sister Lux said.

In her life, Sister Lux has been growing through her own awakenings.

“My faith has deepened,” she said. “It’s been tested many times; my vocation has also been tested. When that happens, my faith or my vocation goes deeper.”

As she begins her next 25 years as a sister, she wants to “stay open to what the spirit of God is calling me to do with my life. You never know when or how that voice will speak to you.”

Sister Lux recognizes that “call” in all its many forms, speaking through an event or a relationship.

“Whenever it seems the call is ridiculous or impossible, that’s the very time God is calling the loudest. Believe me, I know this from experience.”