True Spring: A Reflection on Lent

 

Here’s something you might not know about Lent. The word “Lent” originally meant “spring,” and derived from the Germanic root for “long,” as in the lengthening of daylight during the season.

When I think of spring, I think of light, of green tips budding on dormant branches, and those early spring birds singing persistently and irritatingly at 4:30 in the morning outside my window. I think of piglets being born on my grandpa’s farm, their little pink bodies curling into the voluptuous folds of their mother’s belly.

None of this makes me think of Lent, the season of sacrifice and penance, the quiet slow descent toward Good Friday, perhaps the darkest of all spiritual days, the day we face our loss, preceded by forty days of facing our mortality, our limits, our beginning and our end: ash.

And though this season is so dark, I find it incredibly beautiful. Incredibly refreshing, like resetting the dial, purging the system, going back to zero, to the core of our being and flushing out all the delusions we may have about ourself, our goodness, our strength, our power.

For a season of my life, I worked at a film financing company in Beverly Hills. This job was the culmination of a life-long dream to work in the film industry and so I relished my long commute into Beverly Hills from the suburbs of Los Angeles, driving down Century Boulevard, passing Rodeo Drive, and sliding down the quiet, Maple-dappled street across from the Beverly Hills Tennis club and into the parking garage beneath our building with it’s glinting glass walls and pink marble steps.

Every where I looked in Beverly Hills, at ever turn, there was nothing but the celebration of physical perfection and extravagance. Every day, I parked my humble midnight blue 1994 Honda Accord between shiny new Audis and Mercedes. Everyday, I rode the elevator up to the first floor where our office sat next to Billy Crystal’s production company. Every day, I crossed the courtyard to get lunch or pick up the mail, and passed models from the agency above our office, taking their smoke breaks, or getting their lunches, their legs going on and on for miles, their skin as perfectly airbrushed in reality as you would have seen on the covers of the magazine. Yes, my friends, those pictures are not as false as we’d like to tell ourselves. These creatures really are otherworldly, even in real life. No, my friends, it’s not fair — at all.

At any rate, I was surrounded by beauty, by the worship of gorgeous. The men and women in my office wore the most expensive suits money can buy. My boss ordered his shoes from Italy. It was extravagant.

I remember sorting the mail one day and running across a poster advertisement for Mercedes. It pictured a woman with silky legs, wet lips, and hair like waves, standing on the car. Beneath the picture read, “Gorgeous gets what it wants.”

I could have put that poster up above my desk and made it the modem operandi for our office, our building, the entire city of Beverly Hills.

In the midst of all this glamour and opulence in our office complex there was a dry cleaners. It was located beneath the offices, underground, on parking level one. The cleaners was nothing more than a painted closet next to the mail room. Every day, when I collected the mail, I passed the open door to La Mirada Cleaners. And every day, the small lady who ran the cleaners jerked her head up expecting to see a customer walk through the door. When I passed, I noticed her wrinkled forehead, her mop of dark brown hair.

From the start, I felt an unnerving connection with her. I felt she and I were both outsiders in the polish and gloss of the world where we worked. But I wanted to belong more to the world upstairs with all the glass letting bright sunlight pour through, than the basement where I felt certain I actually belonged, sitting with her in the windowless cell of her office.

Twice she came to our office to pick up my boss’s dirty clothes and both times I noticed her eyes. They were the eyes of a woman who is always shrinking back. She walked in with a battered Banana Republic bag for the clothes. She wore old knitted sweaters, and puffy hair bands. She tipped her chin down and she slumped her shoulders.

Perhaps because I didn’t want to feel so familiar with her, seeing her worried face and small stooped body made me feel apathy. In any other setting, I would have reached out to her. I would have wondered why she was so shy, so uncertain, but in that building populated by models and celebrities and savvy business men, she reflected back to me my own insecurities and so I ignored her.

One afternoon, I left the restroom just down the hall, and as I closed the door behind me I saw her walking toward me. I smiled politely and nodded. She gave me a smile that looked more worried than friendly. I noticed a mark on her forehead as she approached me. At first it looked like shadows playing across her face, then it morphed into what looked like a Buddhist dot, but as she got closer I saw what it was: dark ashes smudged in the shape of a cross.

I had completely forgotten that it was Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. In an instant I saw her kneeling at an altar, the thumb and finger of a priest drawing across her skin. I knew exactly where she had been, and I realized that everyone else in the building would know too, everyone with their fine lines and clean faces, their beautiful clothes and limbs all conspicuously absent of ash and oil, smudge and dirt.

In an instant, I felt drawn to this strange, quiet little lady. I admired her. She was so completely out of place, walking above ground, on the upper floors with the markings of her faith and doubt, her need for redemption displayed across her face. She did not belong in this place that worked so hard to forget it’s weakness and ugliness.

But that is exactly what Ash Wednesday and Lent make us remember. The oil smooth as silk and the grit of ash bring us face to face with our mortality, our finite nature. From ashes we have come and to ashes we will return. We are so utterly human, so utterly flawed. And I love that Lent pushes us to acknowledge this. Lent removes the glamour, the gloss, the polish, and demands. We let go of our pretenses, our false securities, our suffocating self-reliance.

Lent brings us to our need, so that we can arrive at Easter with open hearts and arms.

In a building that regularly echoed the click click click of high heels on marble polished to a smooth gloss, I thought that woman with her creased face marked with dirt was more beautiful than any model.

Her Lent pointed me toward myself, my own darkness and want. Her Lent made me see just how thin and broken was the beauty around me. And by doing this, her Lent pointed me toward the rebirth, the joy, the life, the eternal beauty of true spring — a resurrected Savior and a life redeemed.

Christin Taylor lives in Bellingham, Washington with her husband, Dwayne, her daughter, Noelle, and her son, Nathan. She runs The Blank Page Writing Workshops online, and her first book, Shipwrecked in Los Angeles, is forthcoming from Wesleyan Publishing House early 2012. To learn more about Christin, her workshops, and her writing go to www.christintaylor.com.