Keep Fighting the Good Fight

All Saints · Photo essay · Words and photographs by Joe Bedard

Five months into his priesthood, Father Larry talks about the weight he carries, and why the saints kept getting back up.

Some days, the parish staff can read it on his face. A meeting ends, Father Larry Curtis steps out, and no one needs to ask.

"They'll just see me, I don't even have to say anything," he said, "and they're like, we have stuff for you, but we'll ask you later."

So he leaves the office. "That was heavy," he said, "and I need a moment to talk to God."

Father Larry has been a priest for about five months. In that short time, people have trusted him with grief, with sin and with things they had never said aloud. He takes all of it in. What he is still learning is how to carry it, and when to give it back to God.

This weekend, the Church celebrates All Saints' Day. Halloween, All Hallows' Eve, is its vigil. Ask Father Larry who the saints are, and he doesn't start with miracles. The saints, he said, are "the people who kept fighting the good fight." It is also, he said, the advice he gives most often in confession.

Running from the call

When he first sensed a call to the priesthood, he did not run toward it. He ran from it.

"I'm unworthy, you know, I'm too sinful, I can't do that. … I don't think I'll be smart enough to be a priest."

The fears did not end at ordination. Before his first funerals, he played out every scenario in his head.

"Will I know what to say? Will I be able to console them and walk with them?"

"Come, Holy Spirit"

People often leave their meetings with him sure he knew exactly what to say. They don't hear what is going on inside.

"If they heard my inner dialogue … during the whole meeting, I'm just like, 'Come, Holy Spirit. I have no idea what to say. I have no idea how to help this person.'"

What people bring him can be hard to hear.

"I've heard some pretty terrible things, and I've only been a priest for like five months. And I can't help but think, like, wow, God loves this person infinitely."

Some come back for a second or third meeting and ask whether he sees them differently now. He does, he said, but not the way they fear.

"It's quite the opposite. I love them more because they trust me enough to share."

What he carries, and what he gives back

Some days he walks away sure he said the wrong thing. He has learned that he faces a choice.

"Am I just going to keep moping about it and see myself as a failure? Or am I going to learn my lesson?"

He says he is a perfectionist, so failing does not come easily. He keeps returning to one reminder.

"The world's not gonna burn down because, you know, I messed up … Christ is the Savior, Christ is the Savior, Christ is the Savior."

He has learned that he does not have to keep everything he is given. "There's a lot that we don't have to carry that needs to be surrendered," he said. "But we certainly receive it."

The hidden life of a priest

There was a stretch when he felt he had no time left for himself. He longed for silent, uninterrupted hours of prayer, and something always interrupted them: someone trying the church door, a cleaner, an organ practice he hadn't known about.

On a day off, he went to celebrate Mass alone in the cathedral. Someone came in to play the organ. "I just wanted a little bit of time with you," he remembers praying.

After he received Communion, he broke down.

"I just started bawling, I just started weeping, 'cause it's like, Christ, I just wanna be with you."

He did not know who was sitting in the back. Weeks later, a woman introduced herself. She had been there that day, he said, "crying in the back … on her knees the whole time, the whole Mass." She went home and told her husband.

"It was almost like I was celebrating that Mass for her rather than … for me," he said. Looking back, he believes God let her glimpse "the hidden life of a priest."

Before the sun is up

What keeps him going, he said, is the Eucharist, and the Holy Hour he keeps before it each morning, often before the parish is awake.

"Before the sun's even up … there's already the priest standing on guard in front of the Blessed Sacrament, just praying for his people. … I don't know how any priest could do it without prayer."

When the parish receptionist is out, he covers the phones and the door. From that office, he can watch people stop by the chapel to pray. He does not know their stories, but he knows many of them carry trials and suffering.

"They don't know that I see them," he said. "I'm just staring out the window."

"My main message is just keep fighting the good fight. And when I see them fighting the good fight, … I'm so proud of them."

Keep fighting the good fight

In the confessional, people bring him their failures. He knows how easily they lose heart. "It's easy to focus on our failures," he said. "It's easy to think that we've lost."

So the advice he gives most often in confession is always the same. He gives it so often, he said, that the people who come to him have surely heard it many times.

"Hey, keep fighting the good fight. Keep fighting the good fight."

"I'll say it the rest of my life," he said. To him, it is also the simplest way to describe the saints the Church honors this Sunday.

"If you were to summarize who are the saints, they're the people who kept fighting the good fight. They failed numerous times, but they've always got back up. They've always got back up."

The saints learned they could not do it on their own power, he said. Each time they fell, they had to trust God again for the strength to stand.

He expects that message to be the heart of his homily for All Saints' Day. And in the confessional, he will keep giving it, one person at a time:

Keep fighting the good fight.

Father Larry Curtis serves at Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral in San Bernardino. Words and photographs by Joe Bedard.