Remembering this year, two who've gone before:
Cliff Lichter was a friend from my years as part of the Catholic Worker movement in New York City and San Francisco.
Cliff wandered the country for decades as an itinerant pilgrim, without fixed home or property, as the Spirit took him. He turned up with little warning at Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, monasteries and various intentional communities. He always helped out with whatever menial work needed doing. He was almost ostentatiously humble, but as you got to know him, you realized his intense piety was not for show; the guy really lived within a mystical universe that somehow sustained his unlikely existence.
His Catholic Worker friend Brian Terrell wrote of Cliff and provided an epitaph:
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.
... 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. ...
This was Cliff.
“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
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| In 2000, doing his thing at some conference |
Unexpectedly, Hunter Cutting died in September from pulmonary hypertension. He had trained legions of justice organizers and climate campaigners in the Bay and beyond on how to interact with media. He was my neighbor in the Mission; he was working down the block from the homeless encampment where the SFPD shot Luis Gongoro Pat in 2016. I would see him at vigils where Luis's family demanded justice from the city. Hunter leaves a shocked family; he left us all too soon.
Thank you for letting me know about both of these passings. Indeed, the veil is thin. Crossed paths with Cliff many times and in unexpected places…. May all beings be well.
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