In the warm, comfortable living room of Jonah House, the "community of conscience" he calls home, 75-year-old Philip Berrigan greets a visitor, then settles back into a rocking chair. He looks for all the world like a fellow ready to simply sit and rock and whittle. He's not.

Berrigan has spent half a lifetime fighting for what he calls "peace and justice." He's preached, protested, demonstrated and been arrested in myriad actions against war and nuclear weapons. He has no plans to stop now. Barely five months off a two-year prison stretch he did for an anti-war protest, what Berrigan wants to talk about this day is a demonstration that could land him right back in the federal pen.

In the morning, he'll be out in front of a federal office building, protesting on behalf of members of the Jonah House community who have been barred from returning home by the federal probation system.

"They could arrest me, sure," says Berrigan, who is on probation. He shrugs. "And if they do, OK, all right. We don't choke over going to jail. All of us have done too much of it."

Berrigan himself has gone to prison 60 or 70 times in the three decades since he was arrested for pouring blood on draft records at the Baltimore Customs House, in one of the first anti-war protests of the Vietnam era. He became internationally famous for burning draft records in 1968 as one of the Catonsville Nine. Altogether, his "crimes of conscience" have put him in jail for about nine of his 75 years. He views prison time, he says, as the measure of his commitment.

And he's a man who hates jail.

"No human being belongs in these human zoos," he says. But he gets along very well inside. "I have absolutely no trouble," he says. "That's mostly because you learn nonviolent conduct. You listen to people, first of all.

"Everybody's got a story and nobody wants to listen," he says. "So you listen to people. You try to help out. You teach."

He's become an equal-opportunity teacher. He's taught English to right-wing, anti-Castro Cuban drug dealers from Miami whose politics are diametrically opposed to his. "And you can study the Bible with guys, and some are very eager to do that," he says. "They remake their lives in very astonishing fashion sometimes."

That's not exactly what Berrigan has done in prison. He's written Biblical commentaries while incarcerated, and most of his autobiography, "Fighting the Lamb's War." During his last stretch at the federal prison in Petersburg, Va., he and another peace activist researched the gospels for their political content.

While identified primarily with the peace movement, Berrigan's actions stem from a strong belief in the sanctity of life. So along with war, he opposes Dr. Jack Kevorkian's assisted suicide, abortion and capital punishment.

So does his wife, Elizabeth McAlister. He was a priest and McAlister was a nun when they married nearly 30 years ago. They have three grown children, all born at Jonah House.

They make a handsome couple. McAlister's strong, clear, open face is framed by a striking nimbus of white hair. She's extraordinarily energetic and completely unaffected. Berrigan's a big, handsome, barrel-chested guy who's weathered well over the years. His hair is white, his eyes liquid blue. His face, rugged and lined, creases easily into an engaging, sometimes ironic, smile.

While he talks with his visitor in the Jonah House living room this day, McAlister is at the penitentiary in downtown Baltimore, demonstrating against the death penalty.

"We believe according to the heart of the matter," he says. "We believe that God said, 'Thou shalt not kill.' And everything depends on keeping that commandment. And you love your enemies. They're two central commandments coming out of the Bible. After looking at an awful lot of American issues, we've concluded that and we've invested our lives in it."

Communal living

The Jonah House residence is a four-square clapboard house built by the community and its friends on the edge of the old St. Peter the Apostle cemetery in the heart of West Baltimore, a few blocks below North Avenue.

Ten people call Jonah House home these days, and virtually all, except two young women from other communities who now live there, have been convicted of felonies in connection with anti-war or anti-nuclear actions.

So Berrigan, on probation as a "peace felon," is forbidden to consort with fellow Jonah House felons who joined in a 1997 Ash Wednesday action at a Maine shipyard against an Aegis guided missile destroyer.

They acted in the name of the Plowshares Movement, which got its start in 1980 when Berrigan and his brother, Daniel, a Jesuit priest and poet, and six others poured blood on blueprints and hammered on nuclear warheads at a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pa. Since then, the movement has spread widely, and there have been more than 60 Plowshares "disarmament actions."

Berrigan needed a special dispensation from his probation officer to "cohabit" with his wife, who is also a peace felon, at Jonah House, the community they helped found 26 years ago.

A "faith-based" community, basically Christian, mostly Catholic, Jonah House is more like an extended family than a 1960s commune. Everything is held in common; all is shared. Berrigan uses what might be called the communal "we" when he talks about the place.

The community moved here about four years ago, after existing for more than two decades in a rented townhouse on Park Avenue on Reservoir Hill. In return for the right to live here, Jonah House members care for the old cemetery. They have cleaned up and maintain about nine of the cemetery's 23 acres so far. To help pay bills, they've also long been a community of house painters.

They gather weekly to schedule who works in the cemetery or who goes out to paint or who does the chores around the house. Berrigan does his share. Ninety percent of communal life is drudgery, he says -- "And you've got to be willing to do that."

"I try to do what I can," he says. "Just like I try to do publicly what I can. I'm equal among other equals. It's all egalitarian. We rebel against this business of leaders. And we say that a leader is one who serves best, if anything."

That said, he concedes that because he is a kind of community elder, perhaps his word has more weight in the weekly discussion.

"Well, because of experience," he says. "And maybe it's useful. It's a service of a sort. That's all."

But he does gets overruled, and on big issues.

"Oh, yeah," he says. "All the time."

Work to do

It seems a pretty routine existence for a place government probation officers characterize as having the potential for "on-going criminal activity." While they allow Berrigan to reside here, they have forbidden the return of Michele Naar-Obed and Susan Crane, two Plowshares activists and Jonah House residents also recently released from prison. The demonstration planned for the next day is on their behalf.

"They know we're committed to nuclear disarmament so they don't blow up the world and they don't want us living together," Berrigan says. "It's as simple as that."

As he talks, he looks south into the dying light of a spring day over tombstones and statues that mark graves dating back to the end of the Civil War. Many Irish railroad workers from the B & O's Mount Clare shops in the southwest Baltimore are buried here.

"I'm getting older," he says. "Every time you go to jail now it's harder. Because you're older you're more vulnerable physically.

"But if I have to go back, I'll go back. And with the help of God, I'll make it all right, and try not to whine. A lot of people whine. Americans are great whiners."

During his two years at the Petersburg penitentiary, his assigned job was recycling cardboard in 500-pound bales and crushing aluminum cans in a big hydraulic press.

His cellmate was a drug smuggler from Essex.

"They whacked him [with] six to eight years," he says. "You'd be surprised the number of people with heavy sentences for marijuana. And, reductively, when you look at the whole thing, they're just keeping the price of drugs up."

He worked almost as hard on his days off answering mail that "inundated" him.

"People don't forget you," he says. "People know we're in serious trouble on this planet and they know we're dabbling with 'omnicide,' the death of all things. They don't have the resources to do that much about it. But they'll surely support somebody who's in jail for [fighting] it. And they do."

He says he tries to write back. "I used to spend the whole damn weekend answering mail, answering 30 or 40 letters. That's week in and week out. You just sit there in your cell and you write letters. It's kind of an ordeal.

"But you know you might be able to say something that will be helpful to people. And you're writing from jail so that has a special significance. So you do it."

'A beautiful vision'

A charming little girl in overalls, with wide, dark eyes and a thatch of light brown hair bounces shyly in and out of the Jonah House living room while Berrigan talks. Her name is Rachel. She was born at Jonah House four years ago, and lived there until a couple of months ago, when she was "exiled" with her mom, Michele Naar-Obed, and her dad, Greg Boertje-Obed, a member of the community for 14 years.

"This property has come a long way since we took it over," Naar-Obed says. "It was overgrown. You couldn't get to it.

"I really wish that somehow or other the symbolism of what we do on that piece of land can be conveyed," she adds. "The cemetery represents death in the middle of a dead city and we're trying in our meager way to bring back some sense of life there and it's just such a beautiful vision!"

It's a vision that at first Berrigan had to be convinced to share. He was happy on Park Avenue, didn't want a bigger, nicer house. So why the move?

"I was overruled," he says. "This happens frequently. What do you do? You swallow your ego."

Which, he admits, can be pretty hard at times.

"Yeah, I have a fairly strong ego," he says, laughing. "I have to keep it under wraps all the time."

As it turns out, for a while at least, Berrigan will have plenty more chances for giving in, for getting along, for enjoying the drudgery of life in community. The next morning's demonstration at the federal probation office goes smoothly. No one is arrested, and a probation officer promises to review the files of the people who want to return home to Jonah House.

At the protest, an onlooker learns that Berrigan is 75 years old and suggests, frankly, that he's got maybe another 10 years left.

"At the most," Berrigan agrees.

"Do you want a monument when you die?" he's asked.

He laughs.

"Oh, no, no. Oh, God no," he says. "No. I'd just like my epitaph to be: 'He tried. He tried.' "