Name Gumaro - meaning, origin, numerology

Gumaro or Gomaro, Gumaro de Lier or Gumaro de Lierre, Gummario or Gunmaro, Gomarius or Gomario, Gummarus, Gommaire, Gommaar or Gommer (717-774), is a Catholic saint. His feast day is celebrated on October 11. He is the patron saint of lumberjacks and the Belgian town of Lier.

He was a Frankish nobleman in the service of Pepin the Short, son of the lord of Emblechen or Emblem (Brabant, now in the district of Antwerp, Belgium). After excelling in his service at court, he fought eight years in the lombardy, Saxony and Aquitaine campaigns.

He married Guimaria, Guinmarie or Guinimaria, a noble woman but of very bad character, from whom he separated to live as a hermit. Tradition has it that together with Saint Rumoldo of Mechelen he founded the abbey of Lier, in a place then called Nivedonck, near Emblem, which became a center of pilgrimages.

The marriage of Gumaro and Guimaria was childless. The husband, after returning from the war, had tried unsuccessfully to change the behavior of his wife, who oppressed his servants. As an example of his bad treatment, it is said that he denied beer to reapers; while Gumaro tried to please them.

In the hagiographic version, the episode is a real miracle: what Guimaria refuses to do is to give them not even water so that they would not stop working; what Gumaro remedied by sticking his cane into the ground and making a spring of water sprout and then that fountain remained by memory and testimony of gumaro's holiness. The woman, as punishment, fell ill with fever and the more water she drank the more it burned, and knowing her sin, and that it was God's punishment, and seeing death in the eye, she sent to beg St. Gumaro... He made the sign of the cross on her, and gave her by his hand to drink, and then she was healed. Another miracle that is referred to him is the extraction of a snake from the body of a child, son of a reaper, also at harvest time.

After Gumaro's death, other miracles were attributed to his intercession (the healing of a deaf man, a servant of the abbey, and the gruesome death of two Norman captains who plundered it – Reolfo and Reginatio).

The Virgin Vurachilde reported that the spirit of the saint had appeared to her shortly after his death, claiming that his body should be transferred from Emblem, where he had been buried, to the abbey founded by him. Her body was deposited in a boat without oars, and she sailed alone to the place referred to. The foundation of that abbey also tells in its origin a miracle: Gumaro had decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome, and in the first stage of his projected path he set up his tent cutting a tree. The owner of the tree came to him to protest. Gumaro tied the cut tree with his cingulate and spent the night in prayer before it. The next day, the tree had taken root again. The owner of the tree, in view of the miracle, donated all his land and property to Gumaro. An angel appeared to him and ordered him to desist from the trip to Rome and stay in that place as a hermit, founding a church with the invocation of St. Peter.

The Church of St. Gumaro (Sint-Gummaruskerk) is the main church of Lier, with the category of collegiate, Gothic-Brabantine or flamboyant style (XIV-XVI centuries).

In his honor there is a Sint Gummarus beer, Lier's beer specialty.

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