It turns out Henry VIII was not a very nice guy. Living in the dark ages of human history that preceded Tweeting, his version of the short and nasty was to chop off your head. Or eviscerate you. Or burn you at the stake. He is remembered most of all as an inveterate ladies’ man, but scratch the surface and you find a narcissist, an irascible whiner, a boy who inherited his wealth and power and never grew up—a surprising list of character traits for someone who changed the course of history with a few strokes of his quill.
If you encountered Henry VIII you would be struck by his height, girth and general appearance, which is a kind way of referring to the fact that if his portraits don’t lie, he was a fleshy, balding redhead who loomed over people. He was often advised by his not to attend the beheadings, eviscerations and burnings he himself ordered, because even in disguise his notable form would be recognized, and given the nature of public spectacles and the fickle winds that blew hot and cold around the monarch, a riot might ensue. He was a tremendously divisive character at a time in history when the order of almost everything in Europe was tumbling down. He disliked the pope who wouldn’t give him license to annul one marriage and engage in another. He mistrusted the Holy Roman Emperor, the French, the Scots, most of his relatives and at least three of his six wives. He liked Anne Boleyn until she failed to produce a male heir. Her head came off for the sin of giving birth only to Elizabeth who would become the first Queen Elizabeth of England, and one of the great and memorable monarchs.
As for the stroke of Henry’s quill, it’s never as simple as that, is it? Eight years after he came to the throne, a German monk named Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church, sparking the Protestant Reformation. Change, reform and upheaval were in the air all across Europe. In particular, the institution of the Catholic Church was called out for corruption, charged with robbing those it was meant to serve. The climate of the 16th century was a perfect storm of circumstances that fostered a zealous, power-grabbing monarch. The times themselves were cruel. The sweating sickness swept in, killing its victims within hours. “Merry at dinner and dead at supper” was a popular saying. Punishments were harsh. If you were called out for treason, which had many definitions depending on the whim of the king, you hoped to be beheaded, given the alternatives. Evisceration left you to die with your organs removed or hanging from your body, and death by fire took too long, especially if the wind was up and the flames danced and scattered. You wanted a still day and a good strong fire if you were to be burned at the stake.
Henry and his quill were no more or less responsible for the Protestant Reformation than Luther’s 95 Theses, or for that matter the quill Luther used to write the Theses, or the hammer he used to nail them to the door of the church, or the Wittenberg Castle church itself and those who built it, and the stone from which it was built. In the same way, Henry and his quill, a feather plucked from the wing of a royal swan, were no more or less responsible for the beheading of Thomas Wolsey or Thomas More or Thomas Cromwell, than the swan was, or the lovely English countryside that grew the grass that fed the swan, or even the dinosaurs that evolved to become the feathered creatures we know as swans. Strange as this sounds, Henry’s quill is an accurate illustration of the Buddhist concept of sunyata, a much misunderstood word often translated as “emptiness,” “interbeing” or “interconnectedness.” The meaning I take from it is “nothing stands alone.”
Philosophers have argued for millennia about the role of the individual in relation to the state or to God. In essence, that was what the Reformation was about. Sunyata does not offer an answer to this. Instead, it poses a question: Is there anything, any thought, word or deed, any being, any essence, any consciousness that isn’t in relation to every other? We are all responsible, all connected, and not just those of us who travel this planet together. We are entwined with everything we can’t conceive of, as well as everything we can.
That’s a bit of deep thinking that doesn’t always read well on the page, but here’s one translation: The matters we are struggling with in this country and globally are matters we have struggled with before. No one acts alone. No act stands alone. Henry’s quill or a president’s pen is only as powerful as the circumstances that placed the instrument in the sovereign’s hand, and those circumstances are created over time and by all of us. We act and react. We often fail to see a larger picture. The greatest danger is in closing our eyes and ears, and leading with our mouths. Listening is a crucial art. So is discernment. To empty out means to create of ourselves a container that can receive. Everything. Not just a world we think we want, but the world that is.
This isn’t a recommendation for silence or inaction. I think of it more as an antidote to despair. A kind of humility in the face of what we ourselves have unwittingly conspired to create. Look. This is what’s happening now. This is how we got here. It’s not us and them in the end, it’s just us, all of us. If we choose not to see the patterns of the past, take history as our teacher, we’ll sink under the weight of what feels like our individual responsibility. The man who begged a sandwich from me the other day in the parking lot of the grocery store, he’s neither my responsibility nor his alone; he belongs to all of us, and we to him.
So take up your quill, Henry, and set the course of the Reformation. Strip the monasteries, burn the priests, end religious freedom, start a war. Shun dialogue in favor of punishment. Turn against your advisers if they don’t tell you what you want to hear. You do not do it alone, even if you do it without our permission. We created you, Henry. History gives birth to itself.
