 | | | John Pridmore (Photos by Saxon Bashford) | |
From enforcer to evangelist
As an enforcer in the London underworld, John Pridmore, now 42, went out armed with a machete, ammonia, and, sometimes, a gun. Today, he arrives in schools, parishes, and prisons armed with nothing more than a rosary. Following his dramatic return to the Catholic faith, he turned his back on crime and took up prayer, penance, and Mass. Although baptized a Catholic, he had never practiced his faith. Once Pridmore returned to Catholicism, he became a youth worker in a tough East London neighborhood, then joined the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in the South Bronx. After six months, he felt God calling him back to Britain. He joined the Youth 2000 mission team, leading retreats in parishes and schools. |
Some of the drinkers looked up when John Pridmore strode into the bar. Topping 6 feet, burly, with a shaved head, and wearing a leather jacket, he still looked like a gangster. Pridmore had agreed to meet with me that evening in a smoky bar in the East End of London.
John told me how his life was turned upside down one night in 1991, not long after he had left a man for dead outside a London bar. Soon after, while sitting in his apartment one evening, he heard a voice tell him about all the bad things he had ever done.
“I fell to my knees and pleaded for another chance,” he said. “I then felt as if someone’s hands were on my shoulders and I was being lifted up. This incredible warmth overpowered me and the fear vanished. At that moment, for the first time in my life, I knew that God really existed.”
John and I seemed to click for some reason, and when I suggested a few weeks later that I write his life story, he tentatively agreed, saying that he felt God wanted him to use his experiences to help others. We found a publisher and started meeting for several hours each week in my apartment near London Bridge.
We sat opposite each other in the lounge, my battered tape recorder between us, and I probed John with questions, drawing out of him his memories, experiences, and reflections, but not until he had begun the session with a prayer. After having mapped out a framework and identified key turning points, I started to assemble the fragments of his life and shape a story.
When you sit down with someone to write a life story, you often assume the role of therapist, priest, and even TV talk show host. You delve into dark and forgotten corners,
listen to confessions of things regretted or things not done, and tacitly applaud the way a person overcame obstacles and failures. When I agreed to write the life story of a former London gangster, I could not have anticipated how the relationship was to bring about change in my life.
At this point, my own life was in a mess. I was separated from my wife and daughter and found myself in an emotional battlefield. Aware of the hurt I had caused, I felt like an all-around bad guy who was unworthy of God’s love.
I was spending more and more time in local bars at night, wallowing in a cocktail of self-pity, nostalgia, anger, and guilt. The drink blocked out the pain.
Like many people I knew, I had drifted away from the practice of my faith. There was no particular reason; it just happened, almost without me realizing it. Since my late teens faith had ebbed and flowed in my life. At one time, I began attending Charismatic prayer meetings, but gave up after realizing that I seemed to be the only person who hadn’t been “slain in the Spirit.”
However, when as a journalist I interviewed people about their faith, I would experience pangs of wanting the certainty they seemed to have. I remember feeling this when I spent a week at a Maronite monastery in Lebanon, where I reported on the aftermath of the civil war among the Christian community.
It wasn’t long before John had turned the tables on me when we met in my apartment. “What’s your relationship with God like?” he casually asked one day.
I began by giving him a heavily-edited version of my life, playing down my lack of faith, excessive drinking, and flagging up my time in seminary and credentials as a Catholic journalist. If he knew what was really going on in my life, I figured, he might back out of the project.
“God doesn’t reject you because of what you might be doing, or what you might have done,” he said to me one day. “Look at me. I’m the most broken person you could ever meet. Yet I know that God can use us in our weaknesses. All we have to do is ask for his grace.”
That night, I mulled over these words. They sounded too good to be true on one level. But on another level they had the ring of truth. Why did I think I had to be perfect before God would love me? But how could God love me after the hurt I had caused by leaving my wife and daughter?
The next time we met, John wanted to know if I had been praying. I nodded, mumbling that I found it hard.
“Well, you’ve got to be honest with God,” he encouraged. “Tell God what’s going on in your life. We don’t
