Heroes and Monsters: An Honest Look at the Struggle in All of Us by Josh James Riebock
Your story kills you in the end.
Your life is ticking toward a death scene. One death for each of us.
After that, for the Christian, life is just beginning.
But between now and then, there’s living in the here and now. Chaos and inconsistencies, passion and redemption, ragged perspectives, twisted characters, and things that are profoundly beautiful. There’s realism in bad dreams and hypocrisy in fairy tales. There’s freshness and exhilaration, love and grief, purpose and wandering and unexpected stops along the way. It starts with a cry – a screaming, flailing child struggling to fill his lungs full of air. It ends with a sigh – a silent sinking into the inevitable, as the whisper of breath leaves its home and doesn’t come back again.
You and I are somewhere on this journey, somewhere between the two ends. And as the story continues, we see it from our own unique perspective, and slowly grow to the realization that though the story is ours, we don’t control it. We are neither the author nor the hero. We’re the broken ones, the frightened, the betrayed, the exhausted, and the cowardly. A spark of darkness in each of us, fighting against the light.
As Christian author, Josh James Riebock writes: “Every human…is both an arsonist and an architect, marked with the thumbprint of good and the claws of evil, breathing both death and life into this world. Humans…are both the stench and the aroma.”
But sometimes, we need to be reminded.
That’s why I absolutely loved Riebock’s book: Heroes and Monsters: An Honest Look at the Struggle Within All of Us (and originally recommended by Pastor Tim Challies’ À la Carte.)
I wouldn’t envy the task of the librarian trying to find a genre for this wild tale. It doesn’t fit comfortably in either fiction or nonfiction, memoir or fairy tale, philosophy or comic, theology or parable. It is somehow a part of all of them.
It tells the story of the author – an autobiography of sorts, with a dash of the fantastic and a large dunk of artist’s privilege. It begins with a car accident – a small boy named Josh left alone in a cornfield with his drunk, unconscious father. There in the cornfield, Josh meets Jack – the Christ-figure of the book, who chases him throughout his life story – his rebellion, his wild days, his depression, his romance, and finally, back home again.
Josh’s conversion is the only part of the book that is actually from Jack’s perspective. It was brilliantly done – vibrant with feeling. It was a Eustace-the-Dragon sort of conversion. Jacob grappling with the pre-incarnate Christ. A fight in the darkness with a heavenly angel:
“I pin him in the dirt…he’s an electrocuted worm now, flailing and twitching, and in his panic he can’t hear me, can’t take it – reality is often a detestable thing – so I hold his cold, gray, writhing body and tell him to listen to me.”
Josh continues to flail, screaming, shouting, turning away from the one person who has the power to save him. The heel-grabbing Jacob finally feels the Lord’s grip on his own. He has nothing left in his power but to listen.
“I tell Josh that I’m trying to undo what’s already been done. Josh, I tell him, I’ve always been real….And as the last of his skin vanishes in stone, I tell Josh that the inanimate object has always been him. He’s the statue; he just didn’t realize it…And as much as something this implausible can make sense to someone, Josh gets it. Decades of realities are finally felt.”
When I first started this book, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect; but from the first page, I was gripped. The voice of the story-teller bled through the words. He held up a mirror to your face until in his struggle you saw your own. It was raw with emotion that you recognized in yourself. In his story, you saw yours. And that was amazing.
We don’t always see life as a story. But it is. What we call stories – in books, movies, drama – are just the condensed versions. The sub-creations. The outlet of us playing authors, so we can understand what it means when the Author makes us. As we write and read and study and watch, their tiny shards of existence attract us and pull us inward, until, like the child hanging upside down on the couch in the living room, we see our own lives differently, though they remain the same.
I know I forget that more often than I remember.
When I get home from work, and my introvert self is people-exhausted to the last degree, and I forget to breathe in the smell of dinner cooking on the stove, or smile at my siblings as they pound down the hallway to greet me, or as I collapse onto the floor in my room and irritatedly wonder when the shower will be available for me to use, I wonder if I was reading my own story in a book, if I would like my character. I forget that this world is a crazy, twisted, wonderful tale of which I am privileged to play a part. I forget I’m part of a story. I forget that this story isn’t mine.
We live in “two worlds combined, one world of everything that I hope for and the other world of nothing that I want. This world…is the merging of wonder and horror, of twisted and beautiful, comedy and tragedy, a place where both exist and mingle every day… This world is part heaven and part hell and…every second, inside of me and out, I’m standing at the convergence of the two, at the corner of the damned and divine.”
This book also helped me see my relationships with others more clearly. It helped me recognize the worry that seeps into my heart at betrayal, which causes me to mistrust those who are truly sincere. There is always a vulnerability in love – whether Romantic or Platonic – and it is something we will grapple with as long as we live.
“I want love without drama, romance without pain. I want intimacy without vulnerability. I want a guarantee. I want something that doesn’t exist. Maybe we all do. Maybe we’re all chasing unicorns.”
It helped me see this wild, tragic, wonderful, ugly, beautiful life closer to what she truly is. She “has a limitless supply of rabbits in her hat. In this world, the things that can’t possibly happen always happen. I’m still staring. “
Or at least, I try to. After all, “the people who are most fascinated by the world, are those same people who change the world. No one who’s ever influenced this planet has ever done so without being remarkably curious.”
It helped me to wonder how many times I look “at something…and never really see it. Seven billion people in the world, all of us visually impaired.”
It helped me to laugh more, and to appreciate when I laugh. “Laughter is the evidence that we’re still here, the proof that our tragedies will not define us forever. Laughter is the language of the survivor.”
And finally, when Josh saw this earth from the other side of heaven, he left us with a charge: “Enjoy your old world life as best you can. Embrace it, play in it, wake up and live, because you are in the middle of it all – the sweet, wonderful, cruel, drive-you-mad middle! – and hopefully this inspires you along the way, lifts you up, does something, stirs your affections for your heroic and monstrous life, your interesting life, and for the one who made it all so interesting.”
You’re not the hero of your own life story. And to be honest, this story isn’t even yours. It’s His. He’s the Author. He’s the Hero. He’s center stage, and there in the middle is a Cross. And He chose you, brought you into His world, and wrote your part. The task may be difficult, but He is in it. And He promises a good ending.
Until then, live on.
Soli Deo Gloria,
