Mathieu Phillippe

It’s really easy to say I was closed off. It is what everyone outside of myself could see, for me at the time I wasn’t thinking about much, it was a practice of performing the role of being a kid until I could escape into any world but my own. I can’t say I was unhappy, there were definitely moments of sadness but the reality is that I was numb to everything. Bad, Good, I don’t think a kid has the frame of reference to decipher with his emotions. That’s the pernicious thing about trauma and the way a child deals with it, there’s no way to account for what shape their coping mechanism takes. For me I decided that distraction could occupy my mind and time, and just existing as quickly as I could between opportunities to dull myself with violent video games or lego narratives. The first is about overstimulation to the point of mental deafness, the other is probably more personal, something to do with creating fictional narratives, equally mentally distracting. The reason I didn’t want to feel anything, sadness or happiness, I needed to distance myself from everything that made me at risk of feeling so undecipherable that I wasn’t even avoiding a specific feeling, I was avoiding everything.

It might surprise you to know that living in a self made emotional bunker is lonely, the only type of socialization I got came from being apart of sports teams or going to summer camp. These were enough to fool others into them thinking I was a well adjusted (or at least better adjusted) person. And I did truly love engaging with sports and the love of outdoors. I really had an appreciation for nature. It wasn’t really until I was invited to a Life Teen retreat in Peterborough that I really had a chance at acknowledging my feelings and realize what I was missing out on.

The backstory to this invitation included me at first being forced to reject the invitation to the Life Teen retreat because I had a previous commitment to my hockey team. It wasn’t until that tournament was cancelled that I relented to going to the event which I myself would probably characterize at the time as a boring way to spend a weekend. Looking back it is hard to say what I was feeling that weekend, but I wasn’t indignant about the experience going into it, if nothing else out of respect I found myself with a somewhat uncharacteristically open heart and mind.

Now I can’t remember what exactly compelled me to stand up towards the end of the weekend and speak to the group about my experience. Certain things are just motivated by either an internal need to speak out a truth, which is maybe the way God compels His will on earth. But I ended up speaking to a fairly large group that day all about how empty and alone I was making myself. I think maybe it was out of a need to understand what was happening and gratitude that I spoke up that day. I pretty much laid out all the mistakes and pain that we're left in the wake of losing my sister. I think it was that surrender of pain that I began to understand how deeply unhappy my lifestyle was making me, and only by giving it up was I able to start really dealing with it.

Afterwards I became much more involved in helping out with youth ministry and supporting the groups at my local church of St. Joseph’s parish. It helped me continually address and understand the world as a place with so much life worth experiencing. I was always being called home because I was treating with and in an environment of people who knew His love. Being in that environment healed me. I think even my role in helping contributed to that. I think when I spoke my repeated ‘sermon’ was something along the lines of look at how intimately we can handle our faith and how much grace we receive when we do. It was something I was personally discovering for myself but in teaching we learn. So every instance I spoke about embracing those things I was maybe shouting out silently my own journey of doing just that, holding everything close. And really that hasn’t changed for me, I still feel very strongly and openly and often, if sometimes its hard to discern my emotions, I still haven’t mastered the art of visible expression. I think where that comes through the most is in my studies of art and culture which has been fairly dominant as I achieved my degree in Literature, I was constantly looking at the expressions of humanness as all being apart of those things worthwhile to hold close. So basically I went from a very closed off state to one where everything is apart of the mystery and magnificence of the world and people God has made.

Now if my life were a Hallmark movie that would be the end, camera fades and we just accept a happily ever after. I think the beauty of real life is that we can constantly enjoy our happily ever after when we open ourselves to it. It began for me with being incapable of feeling but now the gift of perspective I see everything as magnificent which is no small thing. In school one concept I studied is the sublime, which is not greatness being so awesome that it cannot be held even in the mind. It’s the feeling of being so overwhelmed that you just feel awe, you literally cannot comprehend what it is, but you know it totally consumes all sensibilities. It can be both good or bad, but the immensity of it is what really enamours you towards it. It’s also very precise, being so delicate and fine that it astounds. That’s how I often go through the world now. So for me that’s really where God's light shines through, this immense thing with so many moving parts that everything taken in at once is impossible to behold, and yet it makes me feel overwhelmingly happy.

Though when I feel this connection the strongest is in nature, the silence of nature is deafening with the sounds of animals, and wind blowing through forests, and rocky terrain. It sounds strange for silence to be deafening but it really is, you can listen to nothing in particular and hear a world in motion without any solidified order or sense to it, Its all just happening. I have found that the time this is most evident is when I have had the chance to visit mountain tops. Your eyes can see until they fail to see any further, you breath in this air that is coming from all around you, for me its this very exciting feeling of witnessing the magnitude of the natural world. Mountains are these places seemingly undeterred by time or the interference of people. They are so spectacular to behold I find and I distinctly know a feeling of great enthusiasm and excitement that it gives me. Those are the highs but even the lows prove themselves to be less so when considering the immensity of the world. Now I understand the world constantly as the product of God’s creation and look at my experiences as serving to understand, or maybe its more indulgence, of Gods will, His creations.