‘Are you alright up there?’ my vicar asked nervously.

‘Yes, absolutely’, I called down from the top of the ladder, clutching a large bedsheet in one hand, and a broom handle, scissors and ball of twine in the other. Mercifully, she hadn’t asked whether I was strictly following the church’s official working-at-heights policy.

A churchwarden’s job can take many forms. One makes tea, churns out a host of Byzantine paperwork, washes dishes, buys biscuits, cheers up clergy, congregants, choristers and organists, hunts for the leaks in the roof, and pours out prophetic curses against the decaying and demon-infested central heating system when it gives up the ghost at inconvenient moments. Now, at the beginning of Lent, I was up a ladder doing something medieval: trying to cover up the big wooden crucifix (or rood) which stands above the chancel arch of our church.

I’ve been encouraging my rural parish church to explore some of the earlier, and particularly pre-Reformation traditions from the Christian calendar, particularly Lent. I have not yet succeeded in bringing back Good Friday traditions such as ‘Creeping to the Cross’, where the clergy and congregation would advance barefoot and on their knees to show reverence to a crucifix, or else the ‘Easter Sepulchre’, where a consecrated piece of the communion host, standing for Christ himself, would be ritually buried in a grave – usually an ornamented stone or wooden box by the altar – watched in an overnight vigil, and then joyfully recovered with much pomp on Easter Sunday from this symbolic descent into the world of the dead.

However, the idea of covering the ornaments and statues in the church for Lent (a custom revived in not a few places) has not – apart from the precarious antics on the ladder – been too difficult to achieve. On Palm Sunday last year – the day which marks Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem before his crucifixion – we also observed the ritual of briefly unveiling the Rood while the choir stood gathered around it to sing the plainsong anthem Ave Rex Noster (Hail, Our King), and the congregation, in pre-Reformation style, brandished newly-cut willow fronds in veneration, rather than the biblical palms like the Jerusalem crowds.

But what, one may ask, does this ‘tomfoolery’ (as Luther put it) with sheets and sticks have to do with the decent observance of Lent? Lent is a time for ‘new and contrite hearts’ says the Book of Common Prayer, and for self-denial, ‘sweet abstinence’ and ‘starving sin’ in the words of the Anglican poet George Herbert: of putting aside the things of this world and going on ‘that religious way’, fixing one’s gaze on the eternal things of God. Indeed, what do these customs offer at all to a world whose interests and travails seem of an entirely different order to such antique rituals?

These rituals, however, have their own way of fixing one’s gaze. Having tottered my way down from the ladder after veiling the rood, it was an unexpected shock to see its familiar form concealed, taken away but finding a ghostly and somehow more intense expression silhouetted beneath its plain covering. And on Palm Sunday, with the rood’s brief unveiling (achieved by the vicar’s husband, hidden behind the chancel arch, deftly and discreetly whipping the bedsheet off it with a 20-foot metal pole), what might have felt like a piece of cheap pantomime in fact turned in to something quite the reverse: an intense moment of wonder at the sight of Christ on the Cross, felt all the more strongly for its having been hidden for so long. These rituals of veiling, to use the expression of the Tudor poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, offer a ‘strange fashion of forsaking’: they conceal that for which the soul longs most deeply, and by that loss and concealment make us perceive and long for them, and indeed understand the need for them, all the more greatly.

Such may also be the intended effect of the other more conventional practices of Lent: of giving up comforts, fasting, and dedicating more time to prayer and reading scripture. Yet, there is one particular benefit to these old rituals. Fasting, meditation, and reading scripture all tend towards being private activities, and make observing Lent seem like a solitary endeavour. Of course, this is not inappropriate given that the season commemorates Christ’s time facing 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. Yet, as Herbert wrote, ‘we cannot reach Christ’s fortieth day’ nor ‘our Saviour’s purity’. It can be difficult to struggle alone while thinking of the spiritual, but the old rituals can be done communally, bringing people together while engaged on a spiritual path, using simple and wordless display to make them think deeply, even beyond words, on the irruption of the eternal.

This idea finds an analogy in the current British national condition. For the last two generations or so, Britain has collectively gone through a similar forsaking. From the 1960s, the Christian religion has undergone a form of veiling. Quite aside from the precipitous decline in churchgoing, its public rituals and presence are being eroded. Collective acts of Christian worship in school assemblies, although mandated by law, are for the most part not performed. The observation of Christian festivals and even the use of their names are in decline (schools and universities, for example now find other names for the ‘Michaelmas’ and ‘Hilary’ or ‘Lent’ terms). Nearly every week, one hears of the removal or attempts to abolish Christian prayers from council meetings, Parliament, ceremonies of remembrance, before formal meals.

Yet, the more that the old public rites and presence of Christianity are veiled, the more society seems to sense their loss. This loss is manifest in the ever greater difficulty society finds in attempting to generate a sense of association and cohesion. Such association was once a natural part of British life, generated through regular worship at the churches, and the collective possession of a Christian culture expressed and conveyed through other Christian public rituals. These provided not just for a way for people to associate, sharing a common idea of good morality and behaviour, but also to come together in the pursuit of a higher spiritual goal. Now, many in a once Christian society lament their incapacity to cohere, while looking enviously at minority communities who do manage to come together in one accord, particularly by means of the ever more public and confident expression of their own religious rites and practices, attaining themselves what once seemed to be a normal part of English community life.

It is for this reason that I do not think the rituals and customs I have endeavoured to bring back to the life of my parish church – veiling the rood, rogation-tide processions through the fields, a choir singing services in plainsong – are tomfoolery. Rather, they wordlessly express the way for an atomised and fractured society to heal: a means of connection with each other, with generations past and yet to come, and with a message that connects man to the divine and eternal. And as it was no great travail to spring the cover from the rood on Palm Sunday, it is not in fact so difficult a matter to rediscover and re-engage with this original but veiled Christian presence. It is only a matter of will.