Marooned: Where You Must Begin

This post, by Pierce Taylor Hibbs, is the first of a series and is hereby offered to the public in grateful memory of Mr. Jonathan Stark, who was suddenly and sadly called home by his blessed Savior on the evening of Saturday, July 11, 2026. Jonathan was a humble, jovial, and deeply beloved longtime teacher, church elder, and friend whose salutary influence reached far beyond what he’d ever admit. He was also an original Greystone board member and zealous advocate for the importance of Greystone’s work. Jonathan also first introduced many of us to Wangerin’s The Book of the Dun Cow. Heaven has become richer for welcoming Jonathan home, and the earthly church is poorer for having lost him. To listen to an interview with Jonathan about The Book of the Dun Cow, visit Greystone Conversations here. To listen to his series “Sweet Cement”—a memorable and rich series of talks on George Herbert whose piety and disposition Jonathan mirrored—you may do so here.

Pierce Taylor Hibbs

Beginnings beget endings. Where we start determines everything. That’s just as true spiritually as it is for anything else, though it can take a lifetime to learn. This is one of the many lessons my heart holds after reading Walter Wangerin Jr.’s The Book of the Dun Cow, the first in his Dun Cow trilogy. Mundo Cani begins with the creaturely knowledge that Chauntecleer must painfully acquire: we are helpless before the deepest evils of the world and dependent upon a deliverance we cannot provide for ourselves.

Chauntecleer and Mundo Cani, the High and the Low

Chauntecleer, the proud rooster protagonist, begins by looking down on a big-nosed, lumpy dog named Mundo Cani. The rooster fumes over being awakened by the dog’s ruckus in the middle of the night. Mundo Cani wails, “Marooned! Marooooned!” and then goes on about his pitiable state of ugliness. Chauntecleer tries to be patient but snaps at this ridiculous disturbance, pelting Mundo Cani with insults: cock-a-mamie, imbecile, rug, sack, doormat. This is the opening scene of the book: a suffering vagabond chided by a proud prince.

Throughout the book, Chauntecleer goes through a series of challenges that shape his character, including a battle against the satanic abomination called the Cockatrice, a rooster-snake commanding an army of death-dealing basilisks. Chauntecleer learns the joy of defending his own, the love of a noble hen, the sorrow that comes with family loss, and the fear that challenges his very life. At his lowest, he finds the Christ-like sympathy of the Dun Cow, whose brown eyes soak up his sorrow, for “His grief had become her grief, his sorrow her own” (126). Eventually, Chauntecleer must test his courage and self-sacrifice at the ultimate level. His character development is a roller coaster, and we watch him grow with both hope and disappointment.

In contrast, Mundo Cani stays “low” throughout the book: always a servant and a self-giving member of the community, putting all creatures above himself. His lowliness is already a kind of greatness. When facing the jaw-dropping ancient evil called Wyrm, a country-sized underground serpent imprisoned beneath the earth, we are not surprised at Mundo Cani’s final act.

And though I was surprised by some of Chauntecleer’s final words, I shouldn’t have been. He ends where Mundo Cani began. Lying down next to his wife Pertelote, he says, “‘Marooned’ . . . He buried his face in the flaming feathers of her throat. ‘Marooned’” (229). Chauntecleer at last felt the condition Mundo Cani had named when he entered the story moaning: the absolute helplessness and limitation of a creature broken by the evils of the world. What sounded merely pathetic at the beginning is revealed as truthful at the end. Chauntecleer must descend through love, fear, suffering, and loss before he can finally speak the word Mundo Cani knew from the start.

Marooned

To be marooned is to recognize at soul level that you are set on an island of self and have no final hope except by deliverance. No one beneath you can push you up far enough. No one beside you can keep you sturdy forever. Their help may be real, precious, and even life-giving, but the peace and grace you finally need must come from beyond you, outside your own resources. It must travel to you from a distant horizon. Your only chance is to recognize where you are and cry for help.

Mundo Cani saw this at the start of the book, though perhaps he had his own journey of getting there, while Chauntecleer went through much to learn it. Both, by the end, knew where they truly were. Both knew the holiness of help and the necessity of humility.

Spiritually speaking, the same is true for us. “Marooned” is, in a sense, the perfect descriptor for someone in desperate need of divine salvation and life-altering change. That is every single one of us. The difficulty is that we don’t feel marooned. We appear to have most of what we need. Much of the time, we aren’t so isolated that we call for help. Apart from deep and crippling loss or pain, which eventually finds us all, we seem to be in control of our lives. “I’m not marooned,” we think. “I’m well-connected and seasonably sovereign over most of my life.”

Jesus is the one who said, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). That’s a word for marooners, not for self-sufficient sovereigns. It is not only a word about how the Christian life begins. It is a word about how every Christian day must begin. Jesus knows how deeply we need his deliverance and how desperate we are for his life-giving Spirit.

If we don’t start our days, our hours, and our moments knowing that we are marooned apart from the grace of Christ, we drift toward pride. And pride is what sinks us.

In the end, seeing ourselves as marooned is the difference between humility that heals and pride that destroys. Humility is not ignorance of our dignity or contempt for ourselves. It is truthful self-knowledge expressed in conscious dependence upon God. As J. I. Packer wrote:

If we are not constantly growing downward into humility, we shall be steadily swelling up and running to seed under the influence of pride. Humility rests on self-knowledge; pride reflects self-ignorance. Humility expresses itself in self-distrust and conscious dependence on God; pride is self-confident . . . self-important, opinionated, tyrannical, pushy, and self-willed. (Rediscovering Holiness, 170)

To know ourselves truly is to see ourselves as marooned, and to praise the God of sails and wind for sending Christ to our shore and the Spirit to guide us homeward.