I am aware that we are in significant days not only for the UK but for Europe.The drama being played out in the financial sphere of nations reverberates around the globe.

Along with others I feel that this day is significant not only for the UK but also for Europe. It is a gateway day, and one where there is an opportunity for strategic shifts.

For some time I have been musing on the impact of the Enlightenment on European history, Industrial Revolution etc and see the Armistice Day renewal of covenant with death and re-affirmation of the lie embraced during the Enlightenment on a continental level. I have not as yet been able to do further research but my initial thoughts, albeit simplistic, run something like this …

I have been involved in personal prayer ministry for a number of years and this has included praying with people who have experienced severe and overwhelming trauma and ritual abuse. The mind’s God-given defense mechanism for ensuring the individual’s survival is to dissociate from the overwhelming trauma – to split off that experience and lock it away, embrace a lie that says “this isn’t happening to me”. My sense is that as a continent Europe has dissociated faith and emotion as a response to historic trauma.

I have reflected on the history prior to the emergence of the Enlightenment movement and it seems that the seed-bed for it was, amongst others factors, the pain of the 100 years of religious wars and the inability of the church to engage with new developments – renaissance, philosophy, social, political, and discoveries in science.

Faced with a failure of the existing religious authority structures to deliver peace and safe society Europe as a continent dissociated faith and emotion, relegating them to the private sphere. The influence of Greek rationalism, the reliance of science and ‘progress’ and man in control of his own destiny led us into the Industrial Revolution and the de-humanising approach to work. Work became the means of self-improvement and was given a moral imperative by the preachers of the gospel of ‘progress’.

Descartes’ influence and in particular his cutting a ‘turf deal with the Pope’ (where he gained permission from the Pope to dissect human cadavers to further medical research i.e. Descartes took the body and the Pope had the soul) being a significant factor in the devaluing of emotion and our humanity, the elevation of rationalism, and contributed to the conditions for the rise of western capitalism, economic slavery and the present disease of consumerism.

The lie embraced – that we do not need Father God, can’t trust him and have to take care of our own needs – a rejection of His parenthood and values became a place of refuge (Isaiah 28:15 and 17) It resulted from the church’s mis-representation of the Father – they were his face on the earth and, for the most part, it was an abusive one.

The systems and nation-states that emerged across the continent of Europe as they took refuge in the lie that they do not need a Heavenly Father, there was no supernatural/spiritual realm that had any value in the public sphere have been crumbling for some time. Some say the first death blow to modernism was in the aftermath of WW1 where across Europe young men and women were treated as cannon fodder and sent ’over the top’ at the behest of the generals far away from the front line. The disposable nature of humanity, the carnage and immense loss of life made possible by ‘progress’ left many disillusioned and questioning – whilst the arms business thrived!  Add to this another world war, Hiroshima, and Vietnam and the dissociative mechanisms break down further.

In the last 50 years there has been an increasing hunger for spirituality as we have gone deeper into the post-modern malaise, lurching from crisis to crisis. The 2008 banking crisis is a further indicator of the fault-line running through the cultural assumption and expectation that we can always make it better and there can always be more.

The riots in 2011 for me, in part, reflect the expression of a marginalised and disenfranchised underclass of ‘flawed consumers’ who lack the wherewithal to access legitimately (through money) the experiences and goods flaunted as the badges of success and worth by the advertising machine and celebrity culture.

At this time of year, as the focus is on Armistice Day and its annual renewal of the sacrifice of the young men and women in 2 World Wars some of the roots have to trace back to the embracing of the lie, the flawed Greek thinking of the Enlightenment period and the church’s compromise and complicity in the process.

What emerged from it is foundational to western society and in particular Europe today. I believe we are at a gateway place – a strategic point of entry into a new expanse in the spirit where we will see the ‘sons of Zion’ roused against the ‘sons of Greece’ (Zech 9:13) – a move of God marked by supernatural signs, wonders and miracles that will show the heart of the Father and the values and ways of the Kingdom of God through all spheres of creation. The challenge for me is to get low enough to see it!