This is another of those great late vocation stories — but with a lot of twists along the highway of life. A lot.

It comes to us from the Detroit Free Press and columnist Susan Ager:

Tony Cureton is 63 years old, the divorced father of two young women he raised alone. He is a grandfather, too.

He nursed until her death a woman he calls “my beloved in Christ,” and still wears the ring she would have given him on their wedding day.

He has been a Girl Scout leader, a cop, a teacher and a monk.

Now, he is a new priest of the Roman Catholic Church, a latecomer to a vocation young men are spurning.

He lives with his frail mother in the former convent of Our Lady of the Lake parish in Prudenville, on the shores of Houghton Lake. Theirs are the only black faces he’s seen in this town of 1,700 people, which swells each summer with cottagers.

But oh is he welcome. “Fervor,” says Gary Miesel, lay leader of the parish council. “That’s the word for him.”

Ordained at 60, Father Tony is perhaps emblematic of the future of the Catholic priesthood. He comes to it with plenty of mistakes and lessons under his belt. He brings to it the enthusiasm of a newcomer and the wisdom of a mature man — torn, patched and restitched, like a child’s favorite stuffed animal.

“I’ve learned one thing,” he tells anyone who asks. “It’s a lot more work being a pastor than a single parent. This family is a lot bigger.”

Although he dreamed of being a priest as a boy, Tony Cureton (CURE-ton) says he spent most of his life running from a real relationship with Jesus.

His parents divorced when he was 3. His mother enrolled him at 6 in a Catholic school in Indianapolis, upon a friend’s advice, and he took to the priests as surrogate fathers. They paid special attention to him, he says, because with ADHD (only recently diagnosed) he was curious and thoughtful, but fidgety and distractible.

Raised a Southern Baptist, his mother converted to Catholicism, telling her son, “I know you’ll come home from school with questions.”

Businessmen in the parish paid to send him to a high school seminary in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Five years later, he said, “the world got ahold of me and I got ahold of the world.”

He dropped out of the seminary and worked for a time as a cop in Ft. Wayne, delivering a baby boy in the back of a cop car, and using his gun just once, to kill a dog about to attack his partner.

At 22 he married his pregnant girlfriend. It was a marriage that lasted just three years. He took full custody of his two young daughters and moved to California to start a new life near his grandmother and in a state where, at the time, college tuition was free.

Working full-time, parenting full-time and studying full-time cast him at times into despair, but during one funk he realized a comforting truth he repeats to himself even today: “Life is a school.”

Always a thinker — “sleep is a necessary evil” — Tony cast about for a spiritual grounding, studying metaphysics and even working with a guru.

Dropping in and out of school, he finally got a bachelor’s degree in psychology and began teaching in Los Angeles public schools, mostly fourth- and fifth-graders.

He loved that work, he says now, “because it’s easiest to see Jesus in the eyes of a child.”

During a train trip around the U.S., he returned to the Catskills and the seminary of his youth. “The chapel drew me like a magnet,” he recalls. On his knees at the altar, he wept with a sense of homecoming and felt a stirring he can only describe as a longing for “more,” for a way to serve God, again.

But wait. There’s more. Much more.

Read the whole thing and marvel at the way God works.

Photo: by Larry Copard, special to the Free Press