When I was a young girl, my family had a saying that grew out of hard experience seeking charity from churches and neighbors. "God save us from good Christians!" we often repeated as one door after another closed in our homeless faces leaving us spiritually hungry and physically wretched.

Lacking the appropriate affiliations and catechisms, we were often left to struggle on our own. Those humiliating experiences helped form my early distrust of all things "religious" and institutional.

Were I not later fortuned to meet certain individuals of true faithfulness, I would never have bothered to explore further into the workings of spiritual practice. Among those exemplary pilgrims for whom I am most grateful is Philip Berrigan, a one-time priest and tirelessly dedicated pacifist who recently passed from this world onto his next assignment in God's big universe. It is rare in our lives that we meet someone who is completely dedicated to a cause. Rarer still do we encounter people willing to suffer on someone else's behalf. To Phil, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount was more than a platitude filled picnic - it was a living code to build an entire life, family, community and world around.

Phil and his brother, Father Daniel Berrigan is best known for radical pacifism and civilly disobedient adherence to the commandment "Thou Shall Not Kill". The Baltimore Four, the Catonsville Nine, the Plowshares Eight to some are just obscure references to dissident actions of years gone by.

To serious students and practitioners of non-violence, the Berrigan brothers and their communities of conscience have offered us a consistent course of action through which we might forge a disarmed future.

War with all its attending degradation was no stranger to Phil Berrigan. A World War Two infantry veteran of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, Phil knew very well what it meant to kill or be killed. Like Saint Francis of Assisi, Phil's experiences informed his conscience and brought him to the point of total resistance to the international machinery of war. Later, his years of ministry in impoverished inner-city parishes deepened his commitment to breaking the cycles of economic, racist and institutional violence he saw being fed by the ceaseless pursuit of military domination.

Phil spent eleven of his seventy-nine years behind prison bars paying his debts to a society that prefers profits over prophets. To some, Phil was a saint, a man of deep compassion and conviction - to others he was a "commie dupe" pain in the you-know-what always in the face of the powers and principalities. To me, he was a friend; a non-perfect man staking his life on the perfect message of love and reconciliation contained in the Christian Bible he studied and practiced from.

It might sound strange to say that I do not grieve his passing. It is precisely because of Phil's deep belief and inspirational life that I am peaceful in the knowledge that his spirit continues on in those of us who hold fast to the vision of a world beyond poverty, racism and war.

Phil Berrigan presenté!

Joyce Katzberg is a musician, writer and long-time activist living in Warren, Rhode Island. Comments are welcome at endwar@earthlink.net

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