The world changes. It becomes something else than what we had expected and not in a progression that we can predict or even see as logical.

As Thorton Wilder put it in his landmark play "Our Town," "Wherever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense." This might seem like a harsh pronouncement, but I believe it is the kind of realistic humility we need to embrace if the hopes for the human race contained in the Beatitudes are ever to come to pass.

Our world is not the world of 1965 during the writing of the Church's hope-filled document Dignitatis Humanae. The Council began the Declaration this way: "Contemporary man is becoming increasingly conscious of the dignity of the human person." Or in another translation, "A sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary man," or the Spanish translation "Los hombres de nuestro tiempo se hacen cada vez más conscientes de la dignidad de la persona humana," (The men of our time are each time becoming more conscious of the dignity of the human person).

It is only in the Italian that we read, "In the contemporary age human beings are becoming more and more aware of the dignity of persons." This is much closer to the Latin original which refers to human actors, human persons as the subjects.

I use this opening phrase to illustrate the humility that Wilder's comment calls us to. First, in attempting to proclaim universal human dignity, many of the translations of the Declaration deny dignity to women. No matter what we say to the contrary, few women see themselves included in the designation "men/hombres."

Second, the beginning of the document points to one of the difficulties we find today with documents written in the Euro-American culture of the 1960s --- the belief that there was such a thing as "progress." You might remember the Disneyland ride called "The Carousel of Progress," I can still recall the catchy song, "There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow!" Tomorrow was clean, technologically driven, affluent and devoid of complexity. In truth, there wasn't such a "tomorrow" waiting for us, and we know this now. What is inherently wrong with the idea of progress?

The idea of progress had three problems I can see: First, it idealized human nature, and in doing so, minimized the power of evil. In the 1960s it seemed impossible that such a technologically adept word could still "sink" into evil. Yet, today, looking back, we can see how the very power of technology allowed for the proliferation of nuclear bombs and the destruction of the natural world. Evil was minimized, denuded of its terrible power in our consciousness, and in such an environment evil grows…unseen.

Second, the idea of progress assumed a universality that is non-existent. The thought that we could refer to "contemporary man" as one group today seems transparently impossible. Then as now, the world was made up of almost countless communities and individuals. The tenets, mores, customs and power-structures dominating these communities were and are most varied. As we surely feel today, what is unthinkable to many (suicidal-terrorism, for instance) is fostered among others as a great and even a religious good. Without knowing one another we assumed a kinship and a moral cohesiveness that did not exist. This is the kinship of human persons that still waits to be built, and will not be fully realized until God's reign. This brings me to my last objection.

The thought of progress is decidedly human-centered. It is a self-reliant goal, one which says we are "becoming increasingly conscious." Yet, in the following paragraphs the Declaration made it explicit that such consciousness of dignity was revealed by God to the human race, and here's the difficulty.

Are we talking about human beings becoming increasingly conscious of one another's dignity, or should we better be talking about human beings trying to embody the teachings of the Gospel, every day and in every way, so that we might cling to the hope that such a lived Gospel will communicate God? Progress for the most part did without God, left God to those who still needed God because they were not self-reliant enough to do things for themselves. Progress believed, and believes, that somehow we mighty humans, countries, religions can save the world. We can't. Only God can.

And such a humble stance would help us to sift through the "layers and layers of nonsense" to which Wilder refers. In a God-centered world, we would not cling to intransigent beliefs so these would define us against others --- "My religion is better than your religion." No, rather we would try out, live with, put on our very bodies, our faith and allow it to work in the world. Here, in the day-to-day living of faith, is where revelation of what is truly good happens, where we live in hope.

As we close this 40th anniversary year of the Second Vatican Council, my own reflection takes me to this hope. Hope is what we find today inside the Conciliar documents, an unrealized but truthful possibility. We must take this vision and incarnate it in our present, grafting into it what we have reluctantly and very painfully learned over these past 40 years.

We must reclaim for ourselves as human beings a radical humility and a God-centered clear-sightedness that says, if there was so much we could not foresee or understand then --- the role of women, the radical diversity of human communities and our limitations to change the world through our own efforts (to name just a few) --- what is it that we cannot see now? What questions, deep and troubling do we need to ask today? What blind spots do we have now that will become apparent in the next 40 years?

In the very closing scene of "Our Town," the Dead who sit waiting and detached at the cemetery assert about the Living, "They don't understand, do they?" I would concur; we don't, we really don't understand, and yet…we have a loving God who does.

In radical humility and in listening with open hearts, we may just learn a little. Human beings were not becoming increasingly conscious of the dignity of one another as the Council hoped. And in calling attention to this --- to our blindness and our sin --- we are listening.

Cecilia González-Andrieu writes from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.