So at one and the same time I was seeing a dawn that filled me with hope, and an abandonment of commitment and seriousness that filled me with confusion. And the light and shadow were two sides of one face. Now that I'm older, I see everything as more ambiguous. Whereas in my twenties I thought of the Second Vatican Council as an outpouring of the Spirit in quite absolute terms, I now see it also as history. All human tribes go through messy and painful but utterly necessary paradigm shifts, with and without the Spirit.
People lose continuity and stability, but the new stuff coming in gives different people energy.
Although I still believe that the Spirit of God was noticeably merciful in giving us Vatican II, I see that it was also a human shift where a paradigm that had worked very well for a long time got broken and a lot of people got lost, but a new coherence began. But I recognize that the Vatican II synthesis holds some aspects of revelation better than others. Notably missing in the Catholicism that got offered in Canada after Vatican II is an understanding of suffering. The sentimental, cheerful church music of the late sixties and seventies couldn't hold the passion and death of Jesus or the passion of any of the prophets. The official line was that with dialogue we would all understand one another, we would all be included, and things would get more participatory and more positive all the time.