I blogged on this before, but here, in his own words, is Joe Eszterhas' brief account of his conversion. Excerpt:
I call it that, too. Why did God save the life of a man who had trashed, lampooned, and marginalized Him most of his life? Why did He take the time and the trouble to save me? It certainly wasn't because I had written Basic Instinct and Showgirls, right? Was it because my wife and I had four little boys we were trying to raise? Possibly.Or was it God's divinely impish sense of humor? "Who, you? You're praying? After
everything you've done to break my commandments and after every nasty, unfunny thing you've written about Me and those who follow Me - now you're sobbing? Praying? Asking Me to help you? Hah! Okay, fine, I'll help you. But if I do, know this: My help will obliterate the old, infamous you. You'll wind up turning your life inside-out. You'll wind up stopping all of your excesses. You know what will happen to you? You'll wind up telling the world what I did for you. You'll wind up carrying my cross in church. Yes, I make all things new - and you will be new, too."Well, I thought I heard God saying all those things to me . . . and then all of the things God said would happen . . . did. My life has turned inside-out. I have stopped my excesses and replaced them with prayer and long walks. I am carrying the cross as often as they'll let me at Holy Angels Church in Bainbridge Township, Ohio. And I have written a book as a thank-you to God. Not just for saving my life, but for saving me.
I am witness to and the beneficiary of God's love for all of us. Am I am witness, too, to the fact that His love is so strong that it was even able to open my rusty old closed heart.
I will thank Him forever because He gave me new life and a heart which is truly able to love for the first time in my life. His love is mine.
Joe Eszterhas. What are the odds? God is good.
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"The issue, as Roland agrees, is not Esterhaz's regeneration but his apparent hypocrisy. If he winds up walking the walk and giving away his ill-gotten gains, then that is something to be happy about."
Maybe he is, we don't know. Giving alms in secret instead of in public is one of the commandments, after all. If he announced that he was giving millions of dollars to AIDS orphans, he'd be called a hypocrite for announcing what a great Christian he is.
It's nice to see that someone has been brought up out of the gutter and made new.
Thanks, PA and Bugg. If you have a chance to read Eszterhas's memoir, you find out even more about the story behind "The Music Box," and it is fascinating.
Eszterhas's first screenplay was for a movie about the tragic history of the U.S. Labor movement, "F.I.S.T." about the Teamster's Union and how it came to be corrupted by the Mafia. (He wrote it but Stallone claimed the credit until the film bombed at the Box Office.)
The issue, as Roland agrees, is not Esterhaz's regeneration but his apparent hypocrisy. If he winds up walking the walk and giving away his ill-gotten gains, then that is something to be happy about.
The issue, as Roland agrees, is not Esterhaz's regeneration but his apparent hypocrisy. If he winds up walking the walk and giving away his ill-gotten gains, then that is something to be happy about.
dangermom: It's nice to see that someone has been brought up out of the gutter and made new.
Yes, I agree with you here.
Oops - sorry, post at 3:39 was incomplete.
Hillary Rettig: The issue, as Roland agrees, is not Esterhaz's regeneration but his apparent hypocrisy. If he winds up walking the walk and giving away his ill-gotten gains, then that is something to be happy about.
dangermom replies: Maybe he is, we don't know. Giving alms in secret instead of in public is one of the commandments, after all. If he announced that he was giving millions of dollars to AIDS orphans, he'd be called a hypocrite for announcing what a great Christian he is.
Yes probably would be by some, unfortunately. The hypocrisy is the public vaunting in his book of his apparent cure which is especially dubious in my mind in that he is a successful writer who is attuned to the prevailing trends in book sales, particularly religiously themed books.
But the subtheme I had in mind is the nature of his cure. That people are cured of various diseases by means natural or supernatural is not the question. Eszterhas' may be a miracle, a contrary-to-nature intervention of God without which he would have died. This is impossible to verify.
But the veteran with the severed legs offers a different prayer, a prayer steeped in humility before the inexorable will of God, not unlike that of Christ in Gethsemane. But also a prayer tinged with the mordant irony that his is an infirmity that God is powerless to heal, or at least has never willed to heal on this earth. And such a miracle would be eminently verifiable. But even the Infinite has a limit and the Omnipotent a debility.
dangermom: It's nice to see that someone has been brought up out of the gutter and made new.
Yes, I completely agree with you here.
(Sorry if this post duplicates - not sure what's happening on my end.)
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