They Took My Royal Title and Jesus Gave Me a Name That Cannot Be Taken

They took my royal title and Jesus gave me a name that cannot be taken.

The letter arrived on a Thursday morning and by Friday afternoon I was no longer a princess in any official sense that the kingdom recognized.

I sat in my apartment in a city that was not Riyadh holding a document that had erased 40 years of identity in three formal paragraphs and I felt something I had not expected to feel which was relief so complete it frightened me.

What I did not know yet was that the stripping away was not the ending of my story, but the beginning of the only version of it that was actually mine.

My name is Hessa Alawsari and I am 35 years old.

I grew up between Riyadh and Toronto, the daughter of a Saudi prince who gave me his name and his ambitions and his absolute certainty that those two things were sufficient inheritance for any child.

They stripped me of my royal title and the God I found in the stripping gave me a name that no letter can erase.

To understand what losing the title meant, I need to explain what having it cost.

My father, Prince Dawoud Alawsari, was a man of the second tier of the Saudi royal family.

Not the inner circle, not the men whose names appeared in international newspapers beside photographs of state visits and oil negotiations, but connected enough that his name opened specific doors and his daughter’s name opened them by extension.

He was a man who understood the architecture of proximity to power and had spent his career building his position within that architecture with the patience and precision of someone who understood that the game was long and the pieces had to be moved carefully.

He had three children.

My elder brother Sammy was being groomed for the business interests.

My younger brother Fawaz was the beloved third child, the one the rules were loosest around because the important positions were already assigned.

And I was the middle child, the daughter, which in my father’s world meant I was a strategic asset of a specific kind.

Now, my education and my presentation and my eventual marriage were all pieces in a larger game I did not fully understand until I was old enough to have already been shaped by it.

He sent me to Toronto at 15, a girls’ school in the Rosedale neighborhood, one of those institutions that had been producing the daughters of wealthy international families for a hundred years and had the particular atmosphere of a place that knew its function and performed it with complete confidence.

The education was excellent.

The social architecture was suffocating in the specific way that institutions designed to produce a certain kind of woman are suffocating, which is that they suffocate you so smoothly and with such evident care for your well-being that the suffocation feels like nurturing.

I was good at the school.

I was good at everything the school valued: academic performance, social navigation, the presentation of self that communicated the correct combination of intelligence and difference.

I made friends among the other international girls, a Lebanese girl named Seline, who became my closest friend in Toronto and who I stayed close to for years afterward.

A Korean girl named Yunji who was funnier than anyone I have ever met before or since.

A British girl named Sophie who taught me that irony was a survival skill rather than a rudeness.

Toronto was where I first understood that I was performing.

Not in the way that teenagers understand that they present differently in different contexts, but in the deeper way of understanding that there was a performance and underneath the performance was a question I had not yet been permitted to ask, which was: who am I when the performance stops?

I finished school and returned to Riyadh for university, then back to Toronto for a graduate degree in international relations, which my father considered useful for the diplomatic and business contexts I would eventually move through on behalf of the family.

Then back to Riyadh where I worked for five years in a role that was formally within a regional policy organization but was functionally about representing the Alawsari name in spaces where that name needed representing.

I was 30 years old and I was entirely the thing my father had built and entirely unsure whether the thing he had built was a person.

I prayed five times a day correctly and consistently and with the same precision I brought to every performance.

I asked Allah for guidance and for blessing and for the success of the family’s interests and for strength to continue doing what was required.

The prayers were perfectly formed.

They returned nothing, not silence exactly, something flatter than silence, the sense of words traveling a great distance and arriving nowhere.

I had not met anyone who described a different experience until I met Seline again.

Seline and I had stayed in loose contact since Toronto, the kind of contact that social media makes possible and genuine friendship makes meaningful even when it is intermittent.

She was living in Montreal working as an architect, had been married for 3 years to a Quebecois man named Mark Côté.

And when she came to Riyadh for a regional architecture conference in the spring of my 30th year, we had dinner at a restaurant in the Al Ola district and talked for 4 hours in the way that old friends talk when they have finally found the time.

Seline was a Christian, Lebanese Maronite, had grown up in the church, had gone through the particular modern experience of educated people with religious backgrounds of questioning everything and coming out the other side not with the inherited faith intact but with something more personally held and more genuinely claimed.

She had encountered Jesus not through the religion of her childhood but through a crisis in her mid-20s that she described as the floor giving way.

And what she found when the floor gave way was a presence that caught her.

She described it the way people describe things they know are true from the inside without needing external validation, without performing conviction, simply reporting what had happened.

She said Jesus was real to her in the way that Mark was real to her, present and personal and specific.

She said the difference between her religion as a child and her faith as an adult was the difference between being told about someone and actually meeting them.

I asked her what meeting him felt like.

She thought for a moment.

She said, “Like being completely known and finding out that being completely known is not as frightening as you spent your whole life assuming it would be.”

I sat with that across the dinner table in Al Ola and felt it connect to something I had been circling for years.

The performance I lived inside was constructed precisely to prevent complete knowing, to show the correct surfaces and protect the interior from view.

The thought that complete knowing could be safe rather than devastating was genuinely new to me.

We talked about faith for most of those four hours.

I asked questions I had never asked anyone out loud.

She answered with the same directness she had always had.

When she left Riyadh, she sent me a book through an international shipping service, a slim volume by a Lebanese Christian writer about encountering Jesus as an Arab woman, about the specific experience of a faith that the surrounding culture considered a betrayal and that she held as the most true thing she had found.

I read it in three nights.

I felt recognized on every page.

The book Seline sent me was the first thread.

I pulled it and what came with it was six months of the most honest intellectual and spiritual work I had ever done.

I want to describe this period carefully because I think the process matters.

I was not a woman who converted casually or emotionally or because life had become difficult and religion offered comfort.

Life had always been comfortable in every external sense.

I converted, if that is the right word, because I followed the evidence with the same rigor I would bring to any important question and the evidence led somewhere I had not expected to go and I was honest enough with myself to go there.

I read the Bible, a parallel Arabic and English text that I ordered through an international bookseller using a method that protected the shipment from obvious identification.

I read the Gospels first and then the letters and then the Old Testament and then back through the Gospels again more slowly.

I read scholarship about the historical Jesus, secular scholarship that had no theological stake in the conclusions and found that the historical record was more substantial than I had been taught to assume.

I read the works of Christian thinkers who had come from Muslim backgrounds and who had asked every question I was asking before I was born and whose answers were careful and honest and did not pretend the difficulties did not exist.

I read all of this the way a lawyer reads a case, looking for the coherence, looking for the character of the central figure across multiple independent sources, looking for the internal consistency of the claims.

What I found was a person, not a system, not a theology in the first instance.

The theology came later and I have found it increasingly coherent the more I have understood it.

But first and fundamentally, a person who was described across four independent accounts with a consistency of character that was itself a form of evidence.

Compassionate without being soft.

Clear about truth without being cruel about people.

Entirely comfortable with the outcast and entirely uncomfortable with the powerful who used their power to crush the powerless.

A person who said things that no one in his culture was saying and who said them not from a position of external authority but from a position of internal knowing.

I was 5 months into this reading when I had the encounter.

I want to say first that I had not been trying to manufacture an experience.

Yet I was reading and thinking and questioning and the encounter was not something I worked toward.

It arrived the way genuine things arrive, not through effort but through an opening that the effort had prepared.

I was in my apartment in the Al Nakheel district of Riyadh on a Thursday evening in October.

I had been reading in John chapter 15 where Jesus says, “I am the vine and you are the branches.”

The image was simple but the claim inside it was enormous.

That the relationship he was describing was not contractual or distant or mediated through a ritual but organic.

The way a branch is connected to a vine, continuous, living, mutually dependent in the specific direction of the branch receiving everything from the vine and producing fruit as a natural result of that reception rather than as a performance offered in exchange for approval.

And I read that passage and I put the Bible on the table and I said out loud to the empty apartment, “I want this.”

“I want to be connected to something real rather than performing connection to something I cannot feel.”

“If you are the vine and you are real and what you described is available then I am asking for it right now with everything I actually am rather than everything I have been presenting.”

I sat in my chair and I waited.

Not with expectation of a specific form of response.

Just open, the performance off, the managing off, just the actual person in the actual moment with nothing held back.

The room changed.

Every person who has described this to me uses different words and the words are all attempting to point at the same thing which does not fully fit inside words.

I will use mine.

The room became inhabited not by anything frightening, but by a warmth and a presence and a quality of attention that was entirely personal, directed at me specifically, knowing me completely, including every performance and every hollow prayer and every year of feeling nothing and choosing me anyway with a completeness that was not sentimental and was not fragile and was not going to evaporate when the feeling faded.

Because it was not primarily a feeling.

It was a knowing, a being known.

The thing Seline had described across a restaurant table in Al Ola that I had carried for 5 months as a concept and was now experiencing as a fact.

I knelt on the floor of my apartment, not in the practiced form of Islamic prayer, just on my knees because standing did not feel adequate to the moment.

And I said the words that were simply true.

I said, “I believe you are real and I believe you are who you say you are and I give you everything I am and everything I have been and everything I have been pretending to be because all of it is yours and I want to stop managing it and start being held by you.”

I stayed on the floor for a long time.

When I stood up, the room was the same room.

The Riyadh night was outside the window.

The furniture was where it had been.

Everything was the same and everything was different in the specific way that things are different when the person inside them has changed at the foundation.

I called Seline at 11 p.m. her time in Montreal.

She answered immediately and when she heard my voice, she said before I had said anything except her name, “Tell me.”

I told her.

She wept.

I could hear Mark in the background asking what had happened and her saying something in French that I did not fully catch and him going quiet in the way of a man whose wife is weeping with joy about something he understands the importance of.

She said, “Welcome, Hessa. Welcome to the family.”

Family.

It was the word I had not known I needed until she used it.

The following year was the year of two lives running on parallel tracks.

The public track, the professional track, the Alawsari daughter track, moving through its expected motions with the expected competence.

And the private track, the real track, growing quietly and steadily through daily reading and the online community of Arab Christian women that Seline connected me with and the occasional encrypted calls with three women in the Gulf who were navigating the same territory.

I attended an underground fellowship in Riyadh twice, introduced through the network, gatherings in a private apartment in the Al Malaz district that operated with Daniel’s protocols: cars parked away, phones left outside, curtains sealed.

Both times I sat in a room full of foreign workers and felt more at home than I had ever felt in any room in Saudi Arabia.

The title was still mine during this year.

I was still Princess Hessa Alawsari, still the daughter of Prince Dawoud, still performing the role on the expected stages.

But the performance had a different relationship to me now.

I was not lost inside it.

I was wearing it.

The distinction sounds small and is everything.

The situation that led to the letter began with a marriage proposal.

My father had been managing the question of my marriage for several years with the particular patience of a man who understood that the right match at the right moment was more valuable than the expedient match.

I was in my early 30s, which in the Alawsari family’s social world was late, but not disqualifying, and the delay had been partially my father’s strategic choice, and partially the result of the fact that I had declined two proposals that had been presented to me with sufficient gentleness that the declining had not caused rupture.

The third proposal was different.

Not in the man himself, though I will say he was intelligent and well presented and in another life and another version of me might have been exactly what was needed.

It was different in the weight my father put behind it.

This was not a presentation for my consideration.

It was a decision that had been made at a level above my father’s usual presentation to me and that was being communicated to me as a path rather than a choice.

The man was from a family whose connection to the current government was significant in ways that my father had been cultivating a relationship with for 3 years.

The marriage was not primarily about me and the man.

It was about the Alawsari family and a strategic consolidation of position at a specific moment in the kingdom’s evolution.

My father explained this to me with a directness he rarely used because the directness was itself a communication.

I am not asking.

I am telling you what serves the family and therefore what you will do.

I sat in my father’s study on a Wednesday evening and listened to him explain the situation and I felt something very clear and very quiet in the center of what he was describing.

I could not do it, not because I was brave, but because I was no longer entirely made of performance.

And the piece of me that was no longer performance knew with complete certainty that entering that marriage would be a betrayal of the person I had become in ways that could not be undone.

I said calmly and without drama that I could not accept.

My father looked at me for a long moment.

He said, “You cannot or you will not?”

I said, “Both.”

He said, “Explain to me why.”

I thought about what to say.

I decided the partial truth was the truth I could offer at that moment.

I said, “I have a faith that is different from what you know about me. A personal faith that I have been developing privately, and the life this proposal is describing is not one I am able to live honestly inside of.”

My father’s face went through several expressions in a short time.

I watched them.

The first was confusion.

The second was the beginning of a specific kind of anger.

The third was the managed expression of a man who has controlled rooms his entire life and controls this one by controlling himself first.

He said, “What faith?”

I said, “I follow Jesus Christ. I have for just over a year.”

The room was very quiet.

He said, “You are telling me you have apostasized.”

I said, “I am telling you I have found something true. I understand that the word you will use for it is apostasy. I understand what that means in this context. I am not able to tell you something different because what I have told you is what is actually true.”

My father stood up.

He walked to the window.

He stood with his back to me for a long time.

When he turned around, his face was composed and entirely closed in a way I had not seen before.

Not the managed composure of a man controlling his reaction, but the closed look of a door that has been shut and locked from the inside.

He said, “You will leave this house tonight. You will not contact your brothers. You will not contact your mother until I have spoken with her. An arrangement will be made for you to leave the country within 2 weeks. The family’s lawyers will be in contact regarding the formal process.”

I said, “I understand.”

He said, “Do you understand that this will cost you everything?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “And you are choosing it anyway.”

I said, “I’m not choosing it over you. I am telling you what is true because you raised me to be honest.”

He said nothing.

He turned back to the window.

I left the house.

I called Seline from my car in the dark street outside my father’s compound with my hands on the steering wheel and the Riyadh night around me and my entire previous life on the other side of the gate behind me.

She answered and I said, “It has begun.”

She said, “I know. We are ready. What do you need right now?”

I said, “To hear your voice for a minute.”

She said, “I am here. I am right here.”

We stayed on the phone while I drove back to my apartment and she said very little and what she said was enough.

The letter arrived 6 weeks later.

By then I was in Canada.

The network, Seline’s connections and the international Christian organization she had put me in touch with had helped me navigate the process of getting out, the visa arrangements, the logistics of leaving a country without obvious detection, the practical steps that people in my situation needed to take and that the organization had helped many people take before me.

I had left with two bags and my Bible and my father’s first name as part of my legal name and the full understanding that the life I was leaving was not going to be there if I came back.

The letter was from the family’s lawyers.

It was formal and precise and in three paragraphs it accomplished the withdrawal of my recognition as a member of the Alawsari family in any official capacity.

My title was formally stripped.

My access to family assets was terminated.

My name would be removed from the relevant records.

I was, in the language of the letter, no longer to be considered a daughter of Prince Dawoud Alawsari or a bearer of the Alawsari name in contexts where that name carried royal significance.

I read the letter in my apartment in Vancouver.

Then I put it on the table and I sat with it for a long time and I felt relief.

Not because losing my family did not hurt.

It hurt with a depth that I could not fully access on the day the letter arrived and that I am still sometimes surprised by years later.

The specific grief of losing a father not to death but to a choice which is in some ways harder because death cannot be argued with and a choice always carries the weight of the possibility that it could have gone differently.

The relief was not about losing the family.

The relief was about the clarity.

The letter had made external what had been true internally for 18 months.

I was no longer performing.

The performance was over.

Not because I had found the courage to end it, but because the situation had ended it for me.

I was simply who I actually was with no title and no role and no approved version of myself to maintain.

I picked up my Bible.

I opened it to a passage I had been reading the week before, the third chapter of the letter to the Philippians where Paul writes about everything he had given up that had once been his identity, his lineage, his religious credentials, his standing.

All of it counted as loss compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

He said he had considered it all rubbish in comparison, not pretending it had no value, but knowing the comparison and making the choice clearly.

I had my own list now.

A title, a name that opened doors, a family whose approval I had structured my entire life around, a role in a world that had specific requirements of me.

All of it on one side of the scale and on the other side, the warmth in a Riyadh apartment on a Thursday evening in October.

The being known completely and loved completely in the same moment.

The presence that had been there every day since.

The community of women who prayed my name on Thursday evenings in various cities across three continents.

Seline’s voice saying, “I am right here.”

The branch and the vine.

The name that the letter could not touch.

I put the letter in a drawer and I got on my knees and I said, “Thank you for the stripping and for what was left when the stripping was done, for the clarity, for the relief, for the name that was more permanent than the name the letter had just removed.”

I have been in Vancouver for three years and I want to describe my life here honestly because I think honest description of the ordinary aftermath matters as much as the dramatic moments that make stories shareable.

My life is smaller than it was.

This is simply true.

I live in an apartment, not a compound.

I work for a regional policy research organization that uses my background and my education in ways that are genuine rather than ornamental.

My understanding of Gulf markets and my Arabic fluency and my insider knowledge of how things actually work in the kingdom beneath the official presentation.

I earn a salary that is comfortable by ordinary standards and negligible by the standards of the life I came from.

I cook my own meals.

I take the bus.

I attend a church in East Vancouver that has a small Arabic-speaking fellowship within it.

A group of 12 people from various Arab countries who meet on Friday afternoons in a room that smells like coffee and somebody’s mother’s cooking and who are the most genuinely known community I have ever belonged to.

They know my story.

They know my father’s letter.

They know the grief I carry for the family that is absent and the gratitude I carry for the family that is present.

They pray for my father.

I pray for my father every day.

Not with anger, with the specific love that prays for someone who has hurt you precisely because the love is not contingent on them not having hurt you.

My mother called me 8 months after I left, not from the family compound, from a mobile number I did not recognize, and she had obtained my number through Seline, who she had found through means she did not explain.

And Seline had been appropriately cautious and then appropriately trusting when my mother said what she needed to say.

My mother said, “I cannot agree with what you have chosen. I want to be honest with you that I cannot agree.”

I said, “I know.”

She said, “But I am your mother before I am anything else. And I am not able to lose you the way your father has decided to lose you. I am not built for that kind of losing.”

I said, “I know that too.”

She said, “Tell me you are safe.”

I said, “I am very safe. I am better than safe. I am genuinely okay in a way I have not been since I was probably 14.”

She was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, “I noticed that even before. In the last year before you left you were different, more present. I noticed but I did not ask.”

I said, “Why didn’t you ask?”

She said, “Because I was afraid of the answer and also because you seemed okay and I had not seen you seem okay in a very long time and I did not want to disturb it.”

We have talked every two weeks since that call.

She does not ask about my faith and I do not withhold it when it is relevant.

We are building something new in the space where the old thing was.

Slowly, carefully, with the honesty that is available when a mother and daughter are no longer managing each other’s comfort at the expense of the truth.

She has not asked me about Jesus directly, but she has asked me twice about peace, where mine comes from, how it is possible to have lost what I lost, and have the quality of presence she hears in my voice.

Both times I told her the answer plainly.

Both times she was quiet and then changed the subject.

I do not push.

Pushing is not love.

Presence is love.

Honesty is love.

I am present and I am honest.

And I trust the one who waited 30 years for me to be ready.

My father has not called.

I do not expect him to call.

I pray for him every morning with genuine love and genuine grief and genuine hope that is not naive about the difficulty but is not defeated by it either.

The hope is not mine.

It comes from the same place everything real comes from.

I hold it loosely and I keep showing up to it every morning.

Seline visited Vancouver 6 months ago with Mark and their daughter, a 4-year-old named Elise, who had strong opinions about the color of her shoes and a laugh that came from somewhere deep and unguarded.

We walked along the waterfront with the mountains in the distance, and Mark took Elise to look at the boats, and Seline and I walked a little behind them, and she said, “You look like yourself.”

I said, “I feel like myself.”

She said, “Tell me what that feels like.”

I thought about it.

I said, “Like the performance stopped and the person underneath it turns out to be enough. Not perfect, not impressive, just genuinely there, genuinely known, genuinely held. Enough.”

She nodded.

She did not say anything for a moment.

Then she said, “He is good.”

I said, “He is very good.”

We walked along the waterfront in Vancouver with the mountains in the November light and the boats on the water and a four-year-old ahead of us who had strong opinions and a laugh from somewhere real.

And I felt the specific fullness of a life that is smaller in every external measurement and larger in every internal one than the life I lived when I had a title and a role and a name that opened doors.

I want to speak to specific people, to every person who is a title before they are a person, whose identity is constructed from credentials and lineage and approved roles and family names that open specific doors.

The title is not you.

I know this because they took mine and I was still there, more there than I had been when I had it.

The title was covering something that did not need covering.

When it came off, what was underneath was not less but more.

Not damaged, but released.

There is a God who knew your name before your family gave you theirs.

And that name is permanent in a way that no letter can erase.

To every woman whose faith has cost her family.

I know the specific weight of that loss.

It is not clean and it is not resolved and it does not stop hurting in a way that suggests it will one day stop completely.

But I also know that the love of Jesus is not a replacement for the love of a father.

It is a different kind of love that makes it possible to keep loving the father who has withdrawn his love without being destroyed by the withdrawal.

I love my father.

I grieve my father.

I pray for my father.

I can do all three because I am held by something that does not require my father’s participation to be complete.

To every person who has performed faith their whole life and felt nothing.

The performance is not the relationship.

You are praying to the ceiling because the ceiling was what the performance pointed you at.

There is a God who is not above the ceiling.

He is in the room.

He became flesh and pitched his tent in the middle of the camp because he was not interested in being above the ceiling.

He is present and personal and reachable by any person who sets the performance down and says, “Here is what is actually true and I would like to know if you are real.”

He is real.

He is in the room.

He was in my Riyadh apartment on a Thursday evening in October when I said I want to be connected to something real.

He was there before I said it.

He will be there before you say it.

The saying is for you, not for him.

He already knows.

To the underground fellowship in Riyadh, the room with the sealed curtains and the phones outside and the 30 people in folding chairs who were risking everything to worship Jesus in the most hostile country on earth.

You did not know my name.

I sat in your room twice and said nothing about who I was and you welcomed me anyway with the complete and uncomplicated welcome of people who know that the ground everyone stands on in that room is exactly level.

I carry you with me.

I pray for you by the general name of the faithful in the kingdom.

The people who know the cost and pay it willingly because what they have found is worth more than safety.

You are not alone.

You are seen.

He sees you in every sealed room.

To Jesus, who was the vine when I was a branch that had been performing rootedness for 30 years without actually being connected to anything.

Who met me in a Riyadh apartment without requiring impressive preparation or correct arrival.

Who has been present every ordinary morning in Vancouver through the coffee and the bus ride and the policy research and the Friday afternoons in the room that smells like coffee and somebody’s mother’s cooking.

Who was not diminished by the letter that removed my title because the name he gave me was never in that letter’s jurisdiction.

Who holds my grief for my father without requiring me to resolve it before he will be fully present with me.

Who is making something in the space my previous life occupied that I cannot yet fully see but that I trust because I have found him trustworthy in the things I can see.

I am Hessa, not Princess Hessa, not Hessa Alawsari in any official sense that the kingdom currently recognizes.

Just Hessa, daughter of the living God, branch of the true vine.

You were known completely by the one who became flesh and pitched his tent in the middle of the ordinary mess of human life so that no one would have to reach up past the ceiling to find him.

They took my royal title and Jesus gave me a name that no letter, no family council, no royal decree, no three formal paragraphs of legal language in any jurisdiction on earth can reach.

The name is beloved.

The name is known.

The name is mine.

And it was mine before I knew it.

And it will be mine after everything else has changed again.

I am Hessa.

I am 35 years old.

I live in Vancouver with a view of the mountains and a life that is genuinely, completely, irreversibly mine.

And I would not trade one day of it for every title I ever held.

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