AN EASTER CELEBRATOR

Among the celebrators of Easter, few will have a greater right to the day's resurrectional joy than Michael Kirwan. For 10 years in a destitute neighborhood of Washington, he has been practicing the rare kind of Christianity written about by St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles. After the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, ''All who believed were together and held things in common, and would sell their possessions and goods and distribute them among all according as anyone had need.''

That makes Kirwan, as it made Simon the Samarian, Barnabas the Cypriot and others of the first-century church, poor in property but rich in faith. At 1305 T St. NW, Kirwan lives with about 30 poor people in what society labels a shelter for the homeless but which Kirwan, in a softer and more accurate phrase, calls a house of hospitality.

Outsiders would get it wrong, too, by saying that Kirwan runs the operation, a 10-room three-story house. ''I don't run it,'' he says, ''I share it.'' He sleeps on a floor-mattress in a third-floor room with two other men. The only difference between Kirwan and the others in the house is that he is voluntarily homeless and penniless.

The one possession he keeps is a philosophical link with the Catholic Worker movement. As cofounded by Dorothy Day in the early 1930s in the Lower East Side of New York, Catholic Worker communities, like Kirwan's, are now in some 60 cities. Day, a journalist and pacifist who lived among the poor she fed and housed for 50 years, often stayed with Kirwan's parents when visiting Washington.

While in college -- at George Washington University in the early 1970s -- Kirwan had the chance to apply the kind of personalized Christianity he had learned from Day, who learned it from studying the early church. One winter night, he took to his dormitory apartment a homeless man he met on the street near the State Department. It was a reluctant encounter. ''You can come for a shower and shave,'' Kirwan recalls telling him, ''but that's all.'' He stayed a month. ''One night I came home, and the man was in a chair listening to Richard Wagner on the stereo. It never occurred to me that a homeless man would love Richard Wagner.''

Others came to Kirwan's apartment. At the end of the winter, he had 15 boarders. This was about a decade before homelessness became a public-policy issue. Kirwan made it his personal issue. ''I gave them a key,'' he remembers, ''and I'd say, 'all right, just come up to the apartment, don't go to sleep in the lobby, don't go to the laundry room, don't camp out in front of someone else's door.' I used to come home, and they'd be everywhere. The university could never figure out who was letting them in and where they were going once they got in. That I'd given them a key was a terrible risk. I think back on it now, and I don't know if I'd do it again that way.''

Kirwan tells this story to emphasize that he never set out to serve the poor this closely. It is a frustrating, wearying life, with seldom a certainty about where money will come from, and never a doubt that the next person at the door will need some. ''I just happened to meet a human being who needed help,'' Kirwan says of his college experience, ''and I kept finding others.''

In the Catholic Worker tradition, Kirwan accepts no government funding. To let the state take care of the poor removes personal responsibility. Dorothy Day wrote of this: ''Poverty is simple and complex at once. It is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. As we face a new threat of unemployment under the shadow of automation, as we face daily terrors of world destruction, centers of mutual help such as our hospitality houses were never more desperately needed than they are right now. Whatever we can do to combat the widespread social evils by combating their causes we must do. But above all, the responsibility is a personal one.''

Kirwan is in touch with several churches around the city. He is a Catholic Christian who mixes an unstinted spiritual life -- daily Mass and daily rosary -- with an unyielding allegiance to nonviolence as a way of life. A parishioner at one church financed the house on T Street. Kirwan's current goal is to raise money for a house of hospitality for elderly women: ''You often find in shelters that the first people out the door when there's trouble are older women. They have been so abused, so hurt, so vandalized, that they can't take it anymore. I'm now looking for a house to open specifically for older homeless women.''

In addition to Dorothy Day and his parents, the other shaper of Kirwan's beliefs in personal service was his grandfather, Michael Kirwan. Students of American politics will remember the name. Irish Mike Kirwan, a child laborer in coal mines and a homeless transient who rode the rails before and during the Depression, was a much-loved House member for 35 years until his death in 1970.

Young Mike Kirwan, 41, has a Gaelic sense of humor that lets him laugh at the oddnesses of life: the people he lives with today are the kind his grandfather once was. Here's another Michael Kirwan back where the first one was. It's progress, for want of a word, that this Kirwan is here by choice.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.