Margaret Lyons was visiting her younger sister, Marie, who had decided to become a Maryknoll missionary after reading the religious community's magazine. Sitting alone in the parlor of the sisters' motherhouse in Ossining, N.Y., the 26-year-old woman couldn't help but notice the map with all the lights representing missions around the world.

Along the bottom of the map were inscribed the words, "The harvest is great, but the laborers are few."

"And I said to myself, "Well, gee, I'm a laborer. I like to work,'" the 83-year-old woman religious recalls six decades later. "So that's what caught my eye. It was that word 'laborer.'"

Maryknoll Sister Margaret Lyons is still serving, along with 32 other so-called retired Maryknoll nuns, at the community's retirement center in Monrovia. Some volunteer at neighboring Immaculate Conception Church, others at various area hospitals, educational outreach and social service centers.

For religious like Sister Lyons, religious life remains diverse, challenging and invigorating in more ways than they could have imagined.

Newly-professed
As a postulant at a farm in Scranton, Pa., where Maryknoll priests had a seminary, the South Boston native worked hard in the kitchen, laundry and gardens, and stuffed a ton of envelopes for mass mailings. Next came three years at the New York novitiate, followed by two years working in the Maryknoll Fathers' treasury department, using her prior accounting experience at Liberty Mutual.

Then Sister Lyons received her first missionary assignment to Chile. After a year learning Spanish, she taught third grade in Concepcion, one of the country's three major cities, and taught school until 1968. But after Vatican II, the Maryknoll Sisters, like many congregations, decided to focus on more apostolic works.

Sister Lyons took on the new ministry of Catequesis Familiar (adult catechesis), which would be the genesis of future Base Christian Communities. Up and down the rugged narrow nation, she taught men and women, including miners living on a mountain in the harsh Atacama Desert. "It was a wonderful program, and the people loved it," she says. "But you felt sorry for them because it's awfully hard work."

In 1984, she returned to the New York motherhouse to toil in the treasury department for three more years. Then it was off to El Salvador, which was just opening up again as mission territory after the murder of four churchwomen and the prolonged civil war. Sister Lyons knew the two slain Maryknoll sisters, Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, as well as another Maryknoller, Carol Peitte, a close friend who drowned when her jeep overturned during a flash flood while on assignment in the war-torn nation.

"Carol had been in Chile with us, and I decided I would go down and take her place because I loved her so much," she explains.

'Being a neighbor'
Sister Lyons wound up in the pueblo of Santa Cruz de Analquito. There was little electricity and no running water. Without an on-site priest, she presided over most Sunday liturgies, prayed the Rosary every night with villagers and introduced them to reflecting on the world of God.

"It was being a neighbor," she points out. "You were just there for them. And they loved you because they knew who you were."

But repeated bouts of pneumonia finally forced Sister Lyons to return to the U.S. in 1993. A year later, with her health improved, she came to live at the community's retirement center in Monrovia, which had served as a TB sanatorium and later as a hospital for Japanese patients (even during the internment camp days of World War II).

Today, Sister Lyons lives, works and worships with her fellow sisters in the former single-story, white hospital and convent, and dining hall and chapel located on 7 1/2 grassy acres at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains.

These veteran missionaries --- who have served in South and Central America, Africa and Asia, as well as the U.S. --- volunteer at City of Hope Hospital, L.A. Literacy Program, Santa Anita Family Services and Foothill Unity Centers. Others donate their time and talents to the Los Angeles Arboretum, AARP Tax Aid Program, Braille Institute, Meals on Wheels and Monrovia Community Center.

In addition, sisters write and occasionally visit inmates at two California prisons, work with the Maryknoll Guild, care for gardens and pray in small groups. A special ministry that has developed over the years is housing women religious from other countries while they're learning English and becoming acclimated to American society.

St. Therese's garden
At Immaculate Conception Church, Sister Lyons taught CCD to Spanish-speaking children and adults for nine years and helped the parish start its pastoral council. She has visited cancer patients, counseled couples with marital problems and assisted the Maryknoll Guild, which sponsors fund-raisers, with their financial record keeping. She's also a devoted bird-watcher.

She drives other sisters to appointments and tends a sizable plot of ground, which includes a Lourdes-like grotto, fish pond and sycamore and avocado trees. But her favorite spot is St. Therese's garden, which surrounds a white marble statue of The Little Flower.

While in the novitiate, she read Therese's "The Story of a Soul," and immediately identified with the French religious-in-training, who also had sisters in the same community. Margaret Lyons, was even more impressed, however, by something else about the 19th century Carmelite nun.

"I really was hooked to Therese because of her notion of the spiritual life," she says as she strolls about the grounds. "And I still have great devotion. I still read her because her whole thing is the 'little way.' Nothing extraordinary. The life of a missionary is like that. Mission is all about relating to people.

"We are spiritual beings, and we are on a quest to become more human. Because the more human you are, the more holy you'll be. It's that human touch that matters. It's not complicated. It's just doing the best you can. All you can do is take one step at a time. Missionaries just do it under different circumstances."

Sister Lyons' smile widens. "Yeah, nobody is floating around clouds here," she quips with a Irish chuckle, glancing over at the statue. "Not yet."