Ash Wednesday comes, and we do something extraordinary. We go to church in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. For one day we break the boundaries of a routine life.

It is a ritual we have practiced since we were children, a moment of remembering who we really are. And as the ashes are pressed into our foreheads, there to mingle with the sweat of our brows, we are signed.

I mean signed like in a work of art, like Van Gogh's haunting "Vincent" hastily added at the edge of a canvas, or a three-year-old's proud scribble of something which just now begins to resemble a name. On our foreheads is a signature, a smudgy Cross, a sign that we are God's.

Lent begins a time when the astounding drama of salvation is replayed all over the earth, when believers repeat the stories that have given meaning to existence for 2,000 years. This Wednesday we begin to re-tell or, better yet, re-live, the narrative of God's amazing and loving presence with us in Jesus Christ.

How do we participate more fully of all that will begin to unfold before us these days of Lent? I want to suggest to you that one way is to look at life as in a mirror. Rather than seeing art as an imitation of reality, can we turn it around and recognize reality as a work of art? Perhaps we can begin by gazing in a mirror at those ashes of Wednesday on our foreheads, so we can start to see ourselves as part of the story where Jesus will soon walk, suffer, die and rise.

I have seen two films recently that I think capture this sense of turning life into art beautifully. At first glance they seem like radically different movies: "Big Fish" is all lushness and exuberance; "American Splendor" takes place on the stark edges of society. Yet both are about the profound healing that happens when we can see the art in our lives, and by seeing the art sense there is an Author.

In "Big Fish," an adult son, faced with his father's terminal illness, is single-minded in his search for truth. This truth, he believes, will allow him to finally know his father. The father, Ed Bloom, persists in telling the story of his life (even as his life wanes) in the way he always has, as a beguiling yarn full of "Big Fish" stories. The ensuing conversations, which make up the substance of the film, unfurl his magically reconstructed life.

As his son and young pregnant wife listen, the dying Bloom recounts his memory of somehow obtaining every single yellow daffodil in six states in order to woo the girl that would become his wife. Story after story, we are similarly captivated by giants he befriends, a crumbling town he rescues, and a bank robber he helps to change his ways.

Through the bigger-than-life drama, what becomes most apparent is Bloom's constant and steadfast goodness, his gentle and caring heart, and ultimately his paradoxical selflessness in the midst of so much bombastic storytelling. I don't want to spoil this movie for you, because I do hope you will see it, so I will save the end. But suffice it to say that like us, when faced with the wonderment of God's story for us, the son has to decide to either finally believe and become part of the story, or perpetually remain at a distance, alienated and unable to love.

The second movie I want to commend to you is "American Splendor," which seems at first the polar opposite of "Big Fish." The true story of Harvey Pekar, a Cleveland file clerk for whom everything always seems to go terribly wrong, "Splendor" is 180 degrees visually from "Big Fish," all dilapidated settings and dreary, apparently pointless lives.

Yet, like Bloom, Pekar decides to turn his life into art. Bloom lived ordinary existence extraordinarily, and in recounting it over and over filled it more completely with meaning; Pekar pushes the very ordinariness of existence, the painful and often dehumanizing life of the late 20th century, to the foreground. In his disarming honesty the art is born.

Unable to draw anything but stick figures, Pekar nevertheless sees life with the acuity of the most trained observer; the result is his collaboration with fine cartoon artists resulting in a series of "underground" comic books. Through these comic books, Pekar meets his wife and is able to embrace his human fragility, culminating in their joint graphic novel "Our Cancer Year."

The film's brilliance lies in no small part in Pekar's insightful understanding that "ordinary life is pretty complex stuff," but also in the interplay between actors and documentary footage, always reminding us, when we would get too caught up in the "art," that this story is "art" precisely because it is real.

So, two stories of two human beings, seeing themselves as part of a larger and infinitely complex story, but one that is ultimately worth re-telling because it is worth living and very much worth living because it is worthy of re-telling. We begin Lent, the time to narrate the story once more of a young Jewish Rabbi, who came to help us see, as St. Paul says "as through a glass darkly": that in the very ordinariness and toil of life that larger and more magnificent story in which we place our hope is revealed.

Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu writes from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. "Big Fish" is rated A-II and PG; "American Splendor" is rated A-III and R.