Last month, Pope Francis and I were airborne over Asia together. In the air at the same time, but on different planes going in opposite directions. The Holy Father was coming back from Japan, and I was headed to India. We would both be thinking about the east, but in rather different ways.
En route back to Rome, the Pope began his customary press conference with this comparison of East and West.
“The saying lux ex Oriente, ex Occidente luxus inspired me a lot,” he began. “‘Light comes from the East’; luxury, consumerism, come from the West. There is this type of Eastern wisdom, which is not only the wisdom of knowing, but of time, of contemplation … The search for personal perfection through fasting, penance, reading the wisdom of the Eastern sages. I believe it would do us Westerners good to stop a bit and give time to wisdom.”
