Francis’ Carmelite life was marked by a rhythmic movement between life as a hermit and work as a missionary preacher in the region of Catalonia and southern France. Soon after his ordination he became a wandering preacher hoping to reignite the Catholic faith among the local people. He regularly spent periods of solitude living in caves in the region, following the pattern of the Desert Fathers. In 1840 Francis was named an Apostolic Missionary by the dioceses in which he preached. Soon after bans on religious communities were imposed in Spain, and so Francis crossed the Pyrenees to live in exile and to continue his solitary life and preaching in southern France. Over the next decade he would write three works exploring and defending the solitary life. His example inspired others to live as he did, and he became a spiritual guide for those seeking a solitary life in service of the Gospel.

  Returning to Spain in 1851, Francis entered back into more active work as a spiritual director of seminarians and a parish catechist for adults. The movement between his missionary work and solitary life brought him to the insight that the Church, his Beloved, was God and neighbours together. His life continued in this pattern even during a six-year banishment by the Spanish government to the island of Ibiza. In his final years, Francis worked to establish the Teresian Missionary Carmelite Sisters and the Brothers of Charity (who later become re-affiliated with the Discalced Carmelite friars). Francis died on 20 March 1872, in the midst of his work that had sought to base the spiritual life on recognising and returning God’s love, rather than merely being caught up in the rational doctrines of his day.

  A first stage in this, when it comes (for example) to disputations with the Jews over their view of Christianity as a recently-founded syncretizing heresy of Judaism, is to decide what Scripture is and what it says. If I argue from my books and you argue from yours, we will never meet; but if we share an agreed foundation, there is some chance. Accordingly Origen compiled a vast synopsis of the different versions of the Old Testament, called the Hexapla. Not all Origen’s specific judgements on soundness were generally accepted, even at the time, but the principle remains a necessary one, indispensable for any constructive meeting of minds.

  Origen’s principle of interpretation of Scripture is that as well as having a literal meaning, its laws, stories and narratives point us to eternal and spiritual truths. The prime purpose of Scripture is to convey spiritual truth, and the narrative of historical events is secondary to this. While we still accept that “Scripture provides us with the truths necessary for salvation”, this view does leave room for over-interpretation by the unscrupulous, and in the controversies of succeeding centuries people would either claim Origen as an authority for their own interpretations or accuse their opponents of Origenizing away the plain truths of Scripture. Even today, the literalist view taken by some heretics of narratives in Genesis which most of us accept as allegorical shows that this controversy will never die.

  As part of his programme of founding everything on Scripture, Origen produced voluminous commentaries – too many of them for the copyists to keep up, so that today some of them have perished. But what remains has definite value, and extracts from his commentaries and also his sermons are used as some of our Second Readings in the Office of Readings.

  In the earliest centuries all vestments were white – the white of baptismal purity and of the robes worn by the armies of the redeemed in the Apocalypse, washed white in the blood of the Lamb. As the Church grew secure enough to be able to plan her liturgy, she began to use colour so that our sense of sight could deepen our experience of the mysteries of salvation, just as incense recruits our sense of smell and music that of hearing. Over the centuries various schemes of colour for feasts and seasons were worked out, and it is only as late as the 19th century that they were harmonized into their present form.