A TREE CALLED WINMURE
We had no furniture when we first moved in. Then came two old armchairs picked up from a second hand shop in Point Road. Then a big old brass bed with a quilt of many blocks and many colours and after a trip to the farm an antique wall stand, a tiny white kitchen table and chairs. Our tiny tree house now complete.
I remember the Lutheran Church next door and the large Catholic Church on the corner of Gordon Road. Strange how we never thought to go in or to become Catholic ... as we did years later. I suppose the fruit had to ripen before that could take place.
I remember the cacophony of bird song at dusk. Absolutely deafening it was. Gordon Road ... one big Mynah hotel at that time.
I remember the couple in the corner apartment who had a small VW Beetle parked in the tiny garage at street level and the old lady who lived alone in the other apartment in the other corner. She was sick for a long time and she eventually died there in that apartment. Why did I never offer to help her? Why did it never even occur to me to offer?
To be drawn into solitude is really an invitation to keep company, especially in our society’s growing secularism, with God’s loneliness. God ignored, hidden, forgotten, profoundly set aside.
Drawn by this desire, the hermit makes a stand and steps away from the world. The hermit chooses the side of the rejected ones everywhere. The hermit chooses the joy of simplicity and voluntary poverty. The hermit is freed up to want nothing more than to grow old loving God.
Today we bought a Lime tree with shimmering golden leaves and we are going to plant it at the back gate and we are going to call it Winmure. It was at Winmure that we were first set aside to live a life as hermits. A life set apart from the world. A life with the sole purpose of keeping company with God.
