Why did Jesus tell the apostles at the Transfiguration “Do not tell the vision to anyone?” It was a mysterious, fantastic encounter with Moses and Elijah and Jesus. It would have been a great tool to evangelize the people, to get the message about Jesus and His Kingdom to everyone, wouldn’t it? To answer this question, we need to include Our Lord’s words, “until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.” Our Lord figured that Peter would not explain this experience correctly until the full “pascal mystery” became crystal clear. Imagine Peter telling people, “Wait till you hear this, you’re not going to believe it. We were on top of a mountain and Jesus conjured up a kind of séance and Moses appeared.” To properly evangelize people, evangelizers need to know and believe in the fullness of the “pascal mystery”. The pascal mystery is usually described as follows: the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. In other words, the “good news” which is the gospel always comes through a sharing in the cross. A true encounter with Jesus cannot be had without uniting our personal suffering, with the cross of Christ. As we try to interpret our personal mystical experiences it is important to pray to the Holy Spirit, that we understand what God is trying to say to us. Without the fullness of the truth, it is easy to misinterpret those experiences.

Pope Benedict XVI related a powerful example of a mystical experience misinterpreted in a letter he wrote during his time as “Pope Emeritus”. “One day in 1980, at a synod on the family, Cardinal Hume (from England) dramatically announced he had fallen asleep— and dreamed. He said he saw the Church as “a pilgrim through history and through life,” hastening “toward all truth” and yet limping along the road. Then he saw that Humanae Vitae’s signposts were “weather-beaten” and in need of new paint. “My dream became a nightmare,” Hume cried, “for I saw the wrong paint being put upon the signposts, and the last state was worse than the first.”

Benedict uses Hume’s dream, this mystical experience to give us a lesson in church politics. Benedict says, “That was how, in the conservative John Paul II era, the revolutionaries so often had to express themselves: in code. Just before the synod, Hume had tried to show PJPII a report registering lay dissent against Humanae Vitae.” Friends in Christ, what was “veiled, coded language” on the part of many leaders in the church has become the public denial of Humanae Vitae. We should ask, what did he mean by the “wrong paint being put on the signposts” which he prophesized would give us a state “worse than the first”? Pope Benedict had a front row seat in the heart of the church over the past century. It is so important that we consider his words carefully. It is so important our mystical experiences be understood along with the mystery of the cross.