1945-56

   
Childhood memories, New Brunswick  

As all sojourners I entered a world marked by the limited and often heroic efforts to promote justice, freedom and the common good against a tide of moral evil for which the human race is also responsible. At the time I was conceived (February, 1945) the Nazi war machine had devastated most of Europe and their ideology of superiority and resentment had justified the extermination of millions of Jews. Ironically it was a Jewish scientist, whose intelligence led to the construction of an atomic bomb, which after being dropped upon innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, three months before I was born.

As a child of the nuclear age of electronic communications, I entered into this world at a time when unprecedented advances in scientific research and technological developments have gone hand in hand with the cult of material progress, the increasing gap between rich and poor, the mediatic trivialization of reality and the increasing number of serious threats to our natural habitat. Without any consciousness of this encompassing context, I was born on November 27, 1945, around three or four in the morning, in St. Joseph’s Hospital of the English speaking port city of St. John, New Brunswick.

At the time I was born my mother suffered from phlebitis, a vain inflammation in one of her legs that kept her and I hospitalized until February. For two months I had her to myself. During that time, as I was told, I initially began loosing weight and as a result of a special diet shortly afterward I began having the opposite problem of being overweight. In this context I was baptized in the chapel of the Hospital. My Uncle Phillipe and his wife Mildred were my godparents.

As I grew up I began to understand, from my mother’s conversations, that in accord with the beliefs her times, she and my father understood infant baptism as saving the child from original sin and from entering into limbo in case of an early death. So from my first days of life I inherited six constitutive elements of my identity: sexually I was male, I was named James Philip Joseph, I belonged to the Morin–St. Onge family, I was granted my rights as a Canadian and with water and the sign of the cross I was received by the Catholic Church as a son who had died to sin and resurrected into the grace of God´s love. As my thought matured and as I began to grasp the human responsibility for the moral evil that plagues the world we are born into, I began to understand what motivates the secular nihilism of our times and to appreciate that the sacred revel´s the gift of God’s love, which if accepted humanizes, constitutes meaning and heals historical wounds.

46 – 1 yrs in nov
47 – 2 yrs in nov
48 – 3 yrs in nov
49 – 4 yrs in nov
50 – 5 yrs in nov
51 – Sept. Grd 1 in Drummond, 6 yrs in nov Confirmación, Grand Falls, 1951
52 – Sept. Grd 2 in Grand Falls, 7 yrs in nov.
53 – Sept. Grd 3 (1) in Grand Falls, 8 yrs in nov.
54 – Feb to St. John, Sept Gr 3 (2) in Silver Falls, 9 yrs in nov.
55 – Sept. Grd 3 (3) St. John, 10 yrs. in nov.
56 – summer to winnipeg, Sept. Grd 4, 11 yrs in nov.
57 – Nov 9 yrs.12 5
58 – 13 6
59 – 14 760 – 15 8
61 – 16 8 June graduate from grade 8
62 – 17 9 June graduate from grade 9 (prov)
63 – 18 10
64 – 19 11
65 – 20 12 MIT66 – Mar
66 discharge
21 Tor Rubermaid Apr 66
67 – 22 Rubermaid
68 – 23 Rubermaid
69 – 24 Rubermaid Apr 69, May 69 Pilkington
70 – 25 Pilkington
71 – 26 Pilkington
72 – 27 Ago 72 Pilkington Sept SAS
73 – 28
74 – 29
75 – 30
76 – 3177