Cliff Lichter, RIP

[Catholic Worker]

From: Brian Terrell <brian195...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 15, 2024, 16:38

“By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast pocket a Bible. And that is all.” The Way of the Pilgrim, 19th century Russia

Our dear friend and brother Cliff Lichter died on July 11, to continue his pilgrimage on another plane. Cliff had been a soldier and a Jesuit brother and a hospital orderly before finding his vocation as a wanderer. I met Cliff at the Catholic Worker house in New York in 1975 when I was 19. Two decades older than I, Cliff insisted from the beginning that we were both each other’s little brother. For decades, Cliff lived out of his knapsack on the road and at various Catholic Worker houses and farms, communes, homes for people with disabilities, communities of resistance, monasteries and convents. 

Cliff was an oblate of Blue Cloud Abbey in South Dakota and he left instructions that his ashes should be interred at the cemetery of South Dakota’s Mother of God monastery, where for many seasons he gardened with the nuns. It is fitting that he died on the feast of Saint Benedict. 

He carried with him a note of introduction from Dorothy Day, dated Sept. 1, ’71, calling Cliff a “dear friend.” “I hope that he finds Catholic Worker friends and receives hospitality wherever he goes.”

In recent years, some of those good Catholic Worker friends in Worcester, Massachusetts, saw that he was well taken care of.  For the last couple of years, I was one of several old friends who prayed the rosary with Cliff over the telephone each week.  I am grateful that I was able to visit Cliff in January.

Photo by Michael Boover