It was in February of 2019 when I sat down with a friend to talk about a testimony I was writing for a retreat. I chose to springboard off of Matthew 27:46 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It was a perfect set of circumstances at the time. She was accustomed to helping people work through their grief, and I was hurting and nursing some pretty serious wounds. My friend redirected me to Psalm 22 to show me that the verse from Matthew was how Jesus was letting those present at His crucifixion know exactly who He was and not so much a cry of disbelief or abandonment. He was identifying Himself as the “Deer of the Dawn”—the One who would be resurrected in fulfillment of the scriptures.
“Read the whole thing, Cindy, and you will see,” she directed me. I heard her voice echo in my mind’s ear as I sat at my desk to crack open the Bible. There it was, Psalm 22. I read it three times and let it sink in. A thought came to mind. Were there any other commentaries about this Psalm? I’ve never been one to take any one story or interpretation from just one source. I needed to triangulate what I was sensing in the reading. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I was intuiting.
I cross-referenced many sources online, before I happened upon a commentary by St. Thomas Aquinas. Somehow the word “deer” just leaped off my screen and up towards the upper shelves of my desk. There a picture was secured by a single piece of Scotch Tape, a drawing my son handed to me just a couple years or so earlier. It was the image of a deer standing on a hill before the rising sun with a single tree over to the side. I remembered the day he gave it me.
“Here mom. I drew this for you while everyone else was finishing their STAAR Test. See. I put three sets of three birds over in the sky, because I know you like the number 333.”
I remembered my Stevie handing me his drawing with a huge smile. I was touched and secured it to my desk, so I could see it regularly. It was so very peaceful and so contrary to all the other drawings he ever brought to me. Now, I was looking upon it with new eyes. It was the “Deer of the Dawn”!
Fast forward several months, I received a text from my sister with the recommendation that I watch Nichole Kidman’s movie, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”. Okay. So, I sat down and watched it. I was mortified and picked up the phone to yell at my sister.
“What the hell possessed you to suggest that this would be a good movie? It’s like the air in the room was swept up in a vacuum. I couldn’t breathe!”
It was true. The movie virtually sucked the life out of anything real or sacred in the story. It was twisted. It was void of any love or hope. It was a true depiction of what hell must be like. It was true horror.
My sister suggested that the story itself was based off of a Greek myth. As the story goes, a hunter came into the woods of the goddess Artemis and killed her most sacred deer, so he owed her his most sacred possession—a tit for tat proposition. But in the case of the movie, the ultimate wager for great sin came in the death of what should have been the sacred “Deer”, so payment would come in full, if one subscribes to the mystery of Jesus’ willingness to pay the ultimate price for all sins.
But in this Godless movie, all is incidental, meaningless, uneventful, and unemotional—even in the face of the killing of an innocent victim. Life goes on as the truth is twisted, distorted, and buried somewhere unseen in this movie. Can’t help but notice that popular culture seems to be slipping into this direction at a greater incline these days. But so are other “cultures”.
What do you hold sacred? Where do you go for truth? Do you accept everything at face value? “The Killing of Sacred Deer” will have you confused, reeling, and drained, but I would say, it was one of the best movies for deeper thought and contemplation. Check it out. Then you can call me or leave comments and yell. It might even make you feel more alive than you have felt in a long time, given the dreariness of the election-pandemic-year gone mad in the United States.