A Pharisee Comes Home
Testimony of Cyprian Blamires

At the age of seventeen, I found myself one night in a Gospel Concert in Winchester Guildhall.  It was to be one of the decisive moments in my life.  In between the numbers the individual band members – lads scarcely any older than myself – took it in turns to stand forward on stage and to talk to us directly, simply, sincerely, enthusiastically and confidently about what Jesus meant to them.  They said they weren’t there to talk about church or religion, but about the possibility of having a living personal relationship with Jesus.  The door was open to anyone to move into such a relationship: all you had to do was to tell God you were sorry for your sins and ask Jesus to come into your life as your Lord and Saviour.  Then you could be assured of one thing: your life would never be the same again.  Jesus would come into your heart and fill it with love, joy and peace.

I had been brought up in the Church of England, but I had never heard anything like this.  That night, I became one of them; that is, I became an Evangelical.  We Evangelicals gloried in the Bible as the infallible Word of god, we gloried in Jesus as the light of our lives, we were happy to meet to study the scriptures, to pray together in whatever words came to our lips, we delighted in singing God’s praises and in sharing our faith wherever we could.  When I went up to college a year or so later, I found many others like me and we encouraged one another and found huge strength in our solidarity.  I loved being part of what was essentially a protest movement; this was the 1960s.  I had no time for the Hippies or the Anarchists.  My way of protesting was to follow the real, authentic gospel, the true message of Jesus which had got encrusted over with so much falsehood and illusion down the years.  We scorned the message of free love; we scorned the message of hate for governments; as far as we were concerned, the hippy and the businessmen were alike trapped in the same delusion of worldliness.  We also scorned many of the people who populated the pews of the mainstream churches on Sundays without ever getting more deeply involved, dismissing them as “nominal Christians”.  Our watchword was commitment.

My desire to lead a committed life led me to the ordained ministry of the Church of England in 1973.  Now I could devote myself wholeheartedly to spreading the Gospel.  But instead, my life took a wholly unexpected turn.  Doubts began to accumulate about my evangelical creed.  An encounter with some Jehovah’s Witnesses forced me to face up to a fact I had preferred to ignore: there were vast numbers of preachers out there all convinced that they were preaching the plain message of the Bible, divided into almost as many sects and denominations and communions and churches.  They could not agree about what that plain Bible message was.  Who was to decide between them?

Was there then some other place for me to find Jesus than by looking in the Bible?  It occurred to me that the one movement of believers in the West which seemed to adopt a completely different approach was the Catholic Church.  For Catholics, the heart of the faith seemed to be a people, the Church, rather than a book.  Of course the Catholic Church referred continually to the Bible – and indeed without those medieval monks who copied the precious test letter by letter, word by word, line by line, and handed it down the generations, we would never have had a Bible.  The Bible was a gift to us from the Catholic Church.  It was with some justification therefore that she regarded it as her book, a book to which she held the key.  Our way was to allow authority to every individual interpretation, and the result of that was plain to see – division and fragmentation.  Amazingly, the Catholic way seemed to generate a mysterious and incomprehensible unity of faith, doctrine and morality in communities across the globe.  We were forever talking about unity, but she already was One.

A terrible and decisive moment happened for me one day when i was in my office preparing a sermon.  By now the Catholic Church was looking more and more impressive to me, but I had so many objections to Catholicism, and one of the strongest was a moral one.  Our evangelical moral stance was resolute: we had no time for wishy-washy morality that treated sin as a minor matter easily overlooked by a loving God.  For us it was literally a matter of life and death.  But I had a vague notion that Catholics were somewhat lax and feeble in morality.  Were not the Mafia gangsters Catholics who went to Mass and then indulged in shooting sprees?  Was the same not true of the IRA?  Wasn’t the Catholic Church soft on gambling, soft on drinking, soft on partying?  I really struggled with this one.  It seemed I thought was had a better moral code than the Catholics.  But then, what kind of behaviour was actually most pleasing to Jesus?

This led me to ask what kind of people were most resistant to Jesus and his message in the time of his earthly ministry?  In other words, what kind of behaviour was most antipathetical to the nature and claims of Our Lord?  The answer was clear – the Pharisees were as much as anyone responsible for having Him crucified.  What kind of people were the Pharisees then?  I made a mental checklist – they were very respectable, they were dedicated churchgoers, they knew their bibles backwards, and they saw themselves as a religious elite.  In a flash, I saw that this could have been a description of me.  I thought I was better than the “nominal Christians” whom I scorned, I thought I was better than the Catholics, I saw myself as belonging to a religious elite, an elite that set great store by Bible knowledge…

My world was shattered in that moment.  I saw myself for what I was, a self-righteous religious prig, a Pharisee of the Pharisees.  There was only one sin that would keep Jesus locked out of someone else’s life, that was the sin of thinking youself superior.  My whole creed was based on such a conviction.  I was a professional teacher of the Christian faith and I had got the wrong end of the stick completely…

But in  the very moment that I saw my wretchedness, I also saw where to look for healing.  I understood in that moment why the Catholic Church seemed so soft on sin to me.  It was because when I thought of sin it was all about particular sins of the flesh to which I personally was not tempted – such as gambling, drinking, womanising.  My vice was a spiritual vice, the vice of self-righteousness, and I had fallen for it hook, line and sinker.  My vice was to think I was better than the gamblers and drinkers and womaniser – and the Catholics.  But they were not the type who crucified Christ, it was my type who could not endure Him.  Not even the thieves or terrorists were crucifiers – was there not a thief on the cross next to jersus who was promised salvation?  And I knew that with the recognition of my disease had come the knowledge of where healing was to be found – in the loving heart of Mother Church, who never gave up on the weakest of her children.

After terrible inner battles I was eventually received into full communion of the Church in 1979.  My troubles began in earnest then, because I had stepped away from my own family tradition, away from my wife’s family tradition and away from my friends.  Spiritually, I was alone apart from a handful of people I talked to at St. Mary and St. Michael’s Church in Commerical Road, Stepney, where I worshipped.  I was thirty-one years old; I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life or where to go for help.  To my utter amazement, I discovered one day from an advertisement in a Catholic paper that there was an entire Society dedicated to assisting convert clergy and religious.  In those days it was known as the Converts’ Aid Society (Since 1992, St. Barnabas Society).  They were marvellous to me, and I owe them an immense debt of gratitude.  Little did I know then that after an abortive fiteen-year struggle to establish myself in an academic career, I would find myself working fo rthe Society as a Regional Organiser, travelling the country talking about conversion and calling on Catholic parishes parishes for help for the work.  Now I can help others travelling the same road – and there are many of them.