Memory, Faith, and Becoming with Lelya King (Episode 13)
Charlotte Donlon talks to author Leyla King about her reading and writing life, her new book—Daughters of Palestine: A Memoir in Five Generations—, and the themes of memory, faith, and becoming.
Learn more about Lelya King and her writing and work here.
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Why It Matters: Leyla’s journey is a vivid reminder that the memories we inherit are not just stories about the past—they’re living threads that shape our present and future.
As I listened to Leyla, I was moved by her deep gratitude for her matriarchal lineage and her willingness to wrestle with the complexities of identity, faith, and mystery.
>>> I’ve often wondered how much of who we are is shaped by the stories we’re told—and the ones we choose to tell.
>>> Leyla’s reflections on generational trauma and healing, on faith passed down and faith reimagined, invite us to consider the gifts and burdens we carry from those who came before us.
>>> This episode is an invitation to examine the roots that ground us and to envision how our own stories might become sources of healing and connection for others.
After Listening to This Episode, You’ll Walk Away With:
A sense of permission to honor your own inherited stories.
Greater awareness of the spaces where gratitude and grief intersect.
How faith and doubt can both be acts of hope.
Please check out this third mini-season and subscribe on your favorite platform. I’d also appreciate it if you could take a minute to rate the podcast and leave a comment to help others find it. Thanks so much for your support!
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As you listen to this episode, I invite you to reflect on your own memories, both personal and collective. Consider how faith and doubt have shaped your path and how the stories you carry have formed you.
Where do you see glimpses of those who came before you?
How might embracing uncertainty open new doors for growth and connection?
What does it mean to become more of your full self, your whole self, not in spite of memory, faith and doubt, but because of them?
This mini-season is an invitation to lean into the fullness of your human experience, to honor the complexity of your history, and to find more belonging as you continue to become more of who you are through your own memories, faith, and doubt.
About Leyla King
Leyla K. King is a Palestinian American Episcopal priest and writer. She is a founding member of Palestinian Anglicans and Clergy Allies (Palestiniananglicans.org) and The Small Churches Big Impact Collective (smallchurchesbigimpact.org). Currently, she serves as the Canon for Mission in Small Congregations for the Episcopal Diocese of West Texas.
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From thankfulpriest.com: I’m the Reverend Canon Leyla King (“Mother Leyla” to some, “Mom” to three, but mostly just “Leyla”), an Episcopal priest and proud Palestinian-Irish-Croation American. Currently, I’m lucky enough to be the Canon for Mission in Small Congregations in the awesome Diocese of West Texas. Before that, for thirteen and a half blissful years, I served as Rector of Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, which made me into the priest I am today and is the source of my identity as the Thankful Priest. As a founding member of the Small Churches Big Impact Collective (smallchurchesbigimpact.org) I’ve worked with friends and colleagues nationwide to identify and amplify the beauty and grace of small congregations. In addition to serving small churches, I have vocations as a writer, an educator and a mother and a particular calling to provide a voice for Palestinian Christians in The Episcopal Church and beyond. After many years away, my journey brought me eventually back to my birth-state of Texas where I now live with my wonderfully British husband and my three beloved kiddos.
Episode Transcript:
Charlotte Donlon:
Welcome to All of This & More. I'm thrilled to share my conversation with Leyla King, a Palestinian American Episcopal priest and author of the new book, Daughters of Palestine: A Memoir in Five Generations.
Leyla's story is a testament to the power of memory, both personal and collective, and how the stories we inherit shape our sense of self, faith, and belonging. In this episode, we explore how Leyla's matriarchal lineage and the memories passed down from her grandmother have become a wellspring of faith and resilience.
Leyla shares how the act of remembering through storytelling, writing, and listening has helped her navigate the complexities of identity-- especially as someone who straddles multiple cultures and histories. We talk about the ways generational trauma and generational healing are intertwined, and how faith, doubt, and gratitude are carried forward in the stories of those who came before us.
Leyla's journey reminds us that memory isn't just about recalling the past; it's about being formed by it, allowing it to expand our empathy and guide us toward greater wholeness. Her reflections on collective memory, ancestral legacy, and the prophetic role of storytelling invite us to consider how our own histories shape who we are becoming and how embracing both faith and doubt can open us up to transformation.
Thanks so much for joining us for this intimate and moving conversation.
You can learn more about this episode and Leyla's writing and work at allofthisandmore.com
Charlotte Donlon
Hi, welcome to all of this and more. I'm Charlotte Donlon and I'm so glad to be speaking with Layla King today. Before we start, can you tell us a bit about your Yeah, I'd love to writing and
Lelya King
Work. Okay, yeah, so I am a Palestinian American Episcopal priest, first generation, and I am just coming out with this book, daughters of Palestine, a memoir in five Generations. It's my first book and I'm super excited about it and I know we'll dig in more a little bit to the story and how I came about, so I'll save that. But I also am an Episcopal priest, and it is my pleasure to serve as the cannon for mission in small congregations in the diocese of West Texas, which is a mouthful of a title, but a really fabulous and fantastic job. And my other vocation and passion in addition to my education and advocacy for Palestine and my people. And my role as a mom is to advocate for the beauty and grace of small churches and small congregations both in the Episcopal church and in the church at large. So I have a big heart for that, and I am really pleased that my job lets me do that.
Charlotte Donlon
That's wonderful. Thanks so much for sharing a bit about yourself. Before we get started, when I have a writer on as a guest, I like to take a few minutes to hear about the reading and writing life, and I'd love to hear a few thoughts on how writing and reading help you belong to yourself, others, God in the world.
Lelya King
Yeah, that's such a great question and you gave me some sneak peeks into your questions. I'm somewhat prepared for this and I feel like I could spend an hour just talking about this question, so I'll try and keep it relatively brief. And it's doubly hard because you're asking about both reading and writing, which I feel like are in many ways very different things in my life. So I'll start with the writing to say that I've always been a writer from a very young age, and it's always been a means for me of just I think being in touch with the divine. And I think when I was a child, I would never have phrased it that way, but looking back and reflecting on my childhood and my young adult life, I see that was certainly a big part of my writing life. And now it is much more intentional.
I feel like that divine voice and the discernment that is necessary to move through life, I access that most easily through writing as simple as journaling, sometimes writing things that I want to put out in the world, but a lot of times just writing in order to hear that divine voice in my heart and in my head. But that's the sort of writing aspect of it. And in terms of reading, I've been a reader even longer than I've been a writer. And reading for me is just about pure pleasure and joy and a lot of times escape, but escape and not escape from reality so much as an escape into the truer reality in which I think we long to live in and to dwell in. St. Augustine has that lovely line about our hearts are restless until they rest in God. And reading for me has been a way to find that rest because in fiction, in literary nonfiction, not so much like the history books, much to my husband's chagrin, but in those more lyrical versions and medias, I think we find truth and a hunger for truth. And so I look for that in my reading a lot of times.
Charlotte Donlon
So are there any books you're reading right now or books you're rereading during these pretty difficult times that help you find some of that rest?
Lelya King
There are, and my reading is very varied. There's not really a through line in the books that I read, and sometimes I finish a book and it takes me a long time to start a new one because I've been so wrapped up in the story of the last one in the world of the last one. But I'll say a couple of things. So one is my friend Sarah Cipher wrote a book a couple of years ago now called The Skin and Its Girl, and it's one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read in my whole life and also takes up the story of Palestine to some extent. I loved that book, I really loved that book and I learned a lot from it as well. And then switching gears, one of my favorite things to do in life is to read to my 10 and a half year old daughter.
She and I read together, my husband reads to our youngest son and my oldest son doesn't have a read anymore. Unfortunately, my middle child, my daughter and I, we read together every night and she has a wide range as well of things that she likes to have read to her. And some of the things we have read together have been classics of my own childhood. So we read the whole Ann of Green Gables series, which is a series of books that I have gone back to again and again throughout my life, even into adulthood. So it was a real joy and pleasure to read those to her. And in that same vein, she really fell in love with the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, and I had not actually read those as a child reading Laura Ingles Wilder and Lucy Maude Montgomery with my daughter was such a joy. And talk about books that hold some truths while also allowing us to escape reality into a world that is full of joy and wonder, and curiosity was a real gift.
Charlotte Donlon
That's wonderful. Thanks so much for sharing. It makes me want to reread both of those series, and I love how when we read books with our kids, how it's like an extra layer of connection and an extra layer of comfort for both parties, for all of us.
Lelya King
Yeah, it really is. And we took a break from that vein. We did a little bit, we read The Hobbit and a couple of books of the Red Wall series, which I also highly recommend, but now we are onto little women, which sort of is in the same vein as Anna Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie. And there is just something so special about reading these books about young women to my daughter and a lot of them really take up some issues of faith and the role that God plays in our lives in some subtle ways, but also more directly than a lot of books written today do. So I really appreciate that too, that it opens some doors for us to have those conversations together, which I really love.
Charlotte Donlon
Yeah, that's wonderful. Again, I feel like I could talk about this question for an hour or two. I know probably every question I ask you, we could have an hour conversation. So while I want to move on, stay on that topic, I'll ask, I'll take it a little bit further. So one thing I'm interested in is what types of external and internal resistance you have experienced while working on larger creative projects, and I would say especially your book Daughters of Palestine, and how were you able to move through those?
Lelya King
I feel a little bit like an interloper here because Daughters of Palestine is the first book I've ever written in addition to being the first book I've ever published. And I feel like it's a bit unfair to talk about that writing experience because I think it's pretty unique and I'm neither expecting nor hoping to have another experience quite like that. The summer after I graduated from college, I had the summer, but I had a teaching job in the fall. So I had the summer before me just empty and I really wanted to dig into my Palestinian identity and I asked my grandmother if she would spend the summer with me, and I bought one of those mini cassette tape recorders that is very old technology now, but was cutting edge back then. And I went over to her house every weekday morning and we would sit together for a number of hours and I would press record and I would ask her some questions and she would start telling me about her life and the lives of our ancestors, which she knew because she had always been a listener and a retainer as she said.
So I had these magnificent stories of my family and my ancestry that we're talking hours upon hours of recorded conversations that I had taken copious notes on as well. And I have always carried them within me, always thought, these need to come out, these have to come out.
There was never the ordained time. The ordained time just hadn't arrived. Then October 7th, 2023 happened, and very quickly we saw the continuing attempted genocide of my people in Palestine happening. And it felt very much like that kairos moment, that ordained time had arrived and knew that it was, this was the time for these stories to finally be revealed for me to finally deliver them into this world. And because I know myself well enough to know that I needed something to hold me accountable, I spent a little money and joined a writing cohort and with a little bit of help joined this writing cohort for Nano Rmo in 2023, which is National Novel Writing Month in November of every month. And I had my grandmother's recordings digitized by then, and I was literally able to write the book in the month of November. I wrote the entire book in the month of November.
There was very little resistance. Your original question was what resistance did I face and how did I overcome that? And there was very little resistance because they had always been living inside of me and they were eager to come out and my fingers just flew over the keyboard and I couldn't type fast enough to a large extent. I would say that one of the things that was very helpful in that time was Angela Yarborough, who ran the cohort, had us identify before we even started writing, why this book and Why now? And it really crystallized for me that sense of ordination for this moment and this time and this place and these words and this story right now and me as the conduit for that. So it was really easy. Once I had that articulated, it was actually really easy to write it all down.
I felt really motivated for that. And by that, so I'm sorry that doesn't answer your question, and I hope other writers are not listening to this and being like, oh, that's how it should always happen. I am very well aware that is not the usual way that this takes place. And it's also been my experience of writing. I'm not the kind of writer that I probably should, but I'm not the kind of writer that has the space in my life to dedicate time and to set aside time for writing. I'm so busy, there's just not space for that. So I don't do that. And my writing comes when it comes. It's always organic and it's always just when it feels necessary, then it just pours out of me. And I find if I try and force it, it's just never as good.
Charlotte Donlon
Yeah, no, I appreciate your response. And it makes me think about how, well, I don't believe in writer's block. I believe in timing. So your answer actually is very much in line with how I view the writing life and creative life and spiritual life. So how many years ago did you do the recordings? 10,
Lelya King
2002. So it was 20 years ago.
Charlotte Donlon
Oh, 20 years ago.
Lelya King
Yeah.
Charlotte Donlon
Okay. So it's been in process in progress for 20 years, right? Yes. I say, and that whole time you were being formed to write the book that needed to be written, and then when it was time to write it, you knew it was time. So you were sensitive to the timing and the prompting. Yes, that's exactly right. Which is amazing. I think it's a beautiful way to have a writing and creative life because especially when you have other things that you give your time and attention to and you can't write every day. I don't write every day. I know a lot of great writers who don't write every day. So it makes sense.
Lelya King
Yeah. I will say that part of the timing for me was that my family and I made a move in the summer of 2023. We were living in rural Tennessee and we moved to Austin, Texas for my husband's job. And so from May of 2023 until January of 2024, I was unemployed. So that was also helpful. But then I had a little more time, but more importantly, my previous employment, which I absolutely loved and adored, it was the best job ever, was serving as the rector of a small church, thankful Memorial Episcopal Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And I absolutely loved that job for many reasons, one of which was that I was the only clergy person, and I was preaching almost every week. I had seminarians over the years, so I usually got a break about once a month, but was preaching pretty regularly at least three times a month. And that takes a lot of creative energy. A sermon is about 1200 words, so I was writing 1200 words weekly, and that was my writing that counts as creative writing in a very real way. I would not have had the sort of creative bandwidth, I think, to write this book if I had still been a parochial priest doing that kind of work on a weekly basis. So not having that on my to do plate really freed up the creative space for me to be able to write this book.
Charlotte Donlon
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm glad it worked out. I mean, I hate that the instigating factor was the October, 2023. I'm so bad about years right now.
Lelya King
Yeah,
Charlotte Donlon
No, I'm with you. So the tragedy and loss and horribleness of all of that, I don't love, obviously, but I do appreciate how it all came, how it all unfolded,
Lelya King
And it's that providential timing, right? It's when these strands come together and what some people might call coincidence, but I would call Providence.
Charlotte Donlon
Yeah. And the book is definitely what it was supposed to be when it was written in 2023 instead of let's say 10 years ago. It would've been a good book, but it would've been a very different book,
Lelya King
And it would not have been this book, and it would not have been the right book. I think you're exactly right.
Charlotte Donlon
Well, thanks for giving us a little bit of a behind the scenes look into how it came to be and your process. With that, I would like to go on and start talking more about the book. So what did you discover about yourself, your faith and or your doubt while writing the book that you hadn't noticed before?
Lelya King
I think the question about something that I had never noticed before is probably not the right question for me because I notice these things. It's just who I am. But I will say that writing the book allowed me to really experience and dwell in that sense of gratitude for the ancestry that I have. And when I speak about ancestry, I'm this sort of line of matriarchal family, family systems, and I'm not trying to denigrate the role of the many amazing men in my life and among my ancestors, but power is so important and really comes through in the book, I think, but also came through in a very real way as I was writing the book. And the fact that my faith is handed on to me through that matriarchal line was something I have known for a very long time. But I think writing the book really deepened my sense of gratitude for these women who have come before me who have done such amazing things without knowing it and have handed me this legacy, this gift of faith in a world that is often so often broken and full of strife and loss and sorrow, and they have shown me in their lives, but also through their lives, given me this gift of faith.
And I'm just so immensely grateful for that. I've always been aware of it, and I've always been grateful for it, but writing the book and seeing it become real, I don't have the words to articulate the amount of gratitude I have for that. And again, it feels like a gift of God's grace to have been given that. And I feel really lucky to have been born in this line of amazing women.
Charlotte Donlon
Yes, it is a beautiful gift and it's definitely evident in the book, and it's a joy to see it and read about it. Has your growing gratitude for this gift affected other areas of life, like your work in the church or parenting or neighboring, and have you noticed? Gosh, that's a great question.
Lelya King
That was not on your original list. Sorry. No, that's a great question. It definitely has, and I would say in numerous ways. First and foremost, my relationship with my daughter. Like I said, I have two sons, one daughter love them all equally. I play no favorites here. And being able to see her as the next in that line has been something indescribably special. And one of the books that we have read together in our nightly reading was Daughters of Palestine. When it was in the proofs stage, she asked if I would read it out loud to her, and I said, I would be happy to. And I can't think of an experience in my life. I love my husband dearly, but reading that book to her tops, like my wedding day, there was nothing else in my life like the experience of reading this book to my daughter.
And it has given me such gratitude for her as well. And I think mother-daughter relationships, certainly in my family, maybe in all families, but certainly in my family, are complicated in a way. I think daughter, father relationships or mothers son relationships have not been so complicated in my experience of them in my family has given me such gratitude for Beatrice and for this beautiful, still complicated, but wonderfully complicated and complex, I think complex relationship that I have with my growing daughter. So that's been a huge impact. And then the other thing I would say is that the Episcopal Church has a pretty horrific track record with how it understands and appreciates and values Palestinians, particularly the Palestinian Christian experience. That has been really hard for me personally, to hold that intention with the truth and the reality of my priesthood, much of which my priesthood and my Palestinian identity are entirely one and the same.
And yet in the outside world, there is a serious tension because of the way that the Episcopal church has treated Palestinians and continues to a large extent to treat Palestinians. So writing the book has not in any way caused any conflict that wasn't already there in my role as a priest of this church, but it has made me really adamant that I have a role, a sort of prophetic role to hold my church accountable for its actions and for its stubbornness in refusing to come alongside Palestinian Christians in refusing to be pastoral towards me and towards many like me. And so I've taken that really seriously and it has helped define my vocation in the church in that way, which is a way that is relatively new to me.
Charlotte Donlon
Okay. That's
Lelya King
Huge.
Charlotte Donlon
Yeah, that is huge. And thank you for being honest about that. I really appreciate that. And I'm sorry that you're having to navigate this, but I'm also really thankful that you are.
Lelya King
Thanks.
Charlotte Donlon
And now this book, one of my hopes for it is that it will help people in the church and all people outside of the church have a better understanding of the Palestinian experience and history and place, and its people. And this really beautiful, I want to say story singular and stories plural. I don't know which, I mean it's one story, but it's a collection of just beautiful stories too. What do you think the role of story is in this moment?
Lelya King
Yeah, I think the role of story is absolutely an entirely necessary, and I have certainly come to understand that and believe that from my personal experience, especially in when it comes to Palestine, but also when it comes to the political and social bananas situation that we're in this country and in the world right now about all the things. There is so much rhetoric that has been co-opted and misunderstood and sometimes unintentionally co-opted, if you even take the word antisemitic, which we use to mean, but Arabs are a Semitic people also, right? So that's such a great example of the ways in which language has failed us, and language actually inhibits us from saying what is in our hearts and what we mean, and it inhibits us from hearing other people because you use words like free Palestine or from the river to the sea, or black lives matter or whatever.
These phrases that have just begun to be used or even very, you would think innocuous things like woke, any of those things, they have accrued meaning to them that sometimes the person using those words doesn't actually mean but gets heard that way anyways because they're just part of this rhetoric that has accrued meaning to it. That is immovable now. And what I love about storytelling is that it does away with all of that, and it just goes underneath. It's like water. It just goes underneath and above and through the cracks and around the walls, and it allows people to speak to one another and listen to one another. In a way, all of the rhetoric just never does. And I have found again and again that I can tell my grandmother's stories, the experiences of my foremothers to someone who believes Palestinians to be the absolute enemy, and I can tell them this story, and they're just human beings.
Everyone is a human being, and all of a sudden the wall crumbles away. There is access, and I think we see this. I'm really convinced this experience of the past 18 months, two years of doing this work now has me deeply appreciating Jesus's use of parables in the gospels like nobody else. It is brilliant. And I always knew that they were effective tools, and now I understand why he uses parable and analogy to some extent, but it's mostly parable all the time because it does work that no amount of rhetoric could ever do. And it is so impactful and it is so transformative, and it is absolutely necessary in this moment that we find ourselves in because people are incapable of hearing each other in any other way. You just have stopped before you've even started in any other mode. So I am absolutely convicted that storytelling is the only way out of this.
Charlotte Donlon
Wow. Amen. Cheers to stories.
Lelya King
Yes, indeed.
Charlotte Donlon
So speaking of stories and your stories, will you read 200 or so words from the book that represent, at least in part the mind, body and soul space you're inhabiting right now?
Lelya King
I feel like I'm inhabiting the entire book right now, to be totally honest with you. So it was hard to just pick one, but I'm going to pick the final chapter, just the opening of the final chapter of the book. And this is in my own voice, and I'm writing from, or I'm speaking from here in Austin on February 11th, 2024. I am white. By that I mean that my skin color is what we term white. I've got fair skin and hazel green eyes like my grandmother's and light brown hair. My dad ou used to say that I have the map of Ireland stamped on my face, my father being half Irish, half Croatian. But only when you look casually, I think look a little further at my deep set eyes, at the bones of my face, at the fullness of my calves and thighs, and you'll see that I am Palestinian still.
The world doesn't look so closely. The world glances at the most superficial aspects of our appearances and makes all sorts of assumptions. So growing up and still to this day, the world experiences me as white, which means of course, that I experienced the world as a white person. And until I was nearly an adult, never questioned that experience. So while my sister with her light brown skin that turned almost black in that Texas sun must have grown up experiencing herself as somehow different as decentered, as non-white, I always only experienced the world with the privilege that whiteness brings, which must be why Zaina knew she was Palestinian well before I did, which is why she was in a position to enlighten and educate me all those years ago, which is why she maybe has never had to work out her own identity as I have done grappling with the implications of a family history that doesn't match the color of my skin and learning to stand up for my own people in an American society that sees Palestine as the enemy.
Charlotte Donlon
Thank you.
Lelya King
Yeah.
Charlotte Donlon
So this excerpt on identity and you grappling with your identity, can you share your thoughts on how the collective nature of memory, faith, doubt, and mystery sort of influence your identity and how you are able to embrace it or how, I don't know if influence is the right word, but how it intersects with identity?
Lelya King
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. And one of the things that finally writing this book has helped me to understand is that memory precedes our own lived experience. What I mean by that is, first of all, my memory is terrible. I have an absolutely terrible memory. I have a terrible memory when it comes to short-term experiences. If you asked me what we had for dinner last night, I would probably not be able to tell you. And I also have a terrible long-term memory. I have no good memory whatsoever, and my husband often laughs at me for that reason. So I have very few childhood, even early, young adulthood memories. And what I rely on for my memories are actually stories that my family have told me about myself that I can, sometimes someone tells me a story about something that happened to me, and sometimes it will trigger a vague memory of that story.
So that has always been my experience of memory. My own memory has relied so much on other people's memories too. And so I feel very comfortable with that. And I think writing this book and going back to the interviews with my grandmother have revealed just how much that is true not just for my early childhood, but for moments in history that I was not present for and that I was not born for, born during. So the memories of my grandmother, many of which are memories that she actually took from her grandparents and her grandmother, they have become mine in a very real way. And you want to talk about mystery. I say those words and I am thinking, oh, someone listening to me must think I'm completely crazy. That doesn't make any logical sense. There is no way that someone else's memory that I was not present for could somehow become my own memory.
But it is nonetheless true. I can't explain it. I don't know how to explain it, but I just know it in the very depth of my being. That is nonetheless true, and I think that's important to recognize because there is gift in that for sure. There is a huge amount of blessing in that. And it also explains in a very real way, generational trauma because those memories become part of us even if we did not experience them ourselves. And once you realize that, and once you recognize that, it helps to explain so much that is broken and tragic in this world that we live in. And once you understand that, then I think there is place for grace and for the spirit's movements and for the hope of a better world where we can come to some understanding and empathy with one another and work towards forgiveness and reconciliation. So that was a big answer that I don't know that we have time to unpack. But yeah, hopefully that answers somewhat your question.
Charlotte Donlon
Yeah, no, it's wonderful. And again, I wish we had an hour to unpack it, but I do want to go a little deeper with it. When you were writing the book and holding these stories with your grandmother, maybe even or through the years, did you find yourself grieving some of the suffering in a very individual personal way? Yes. Processing some of the trauma.
Lelya King
I don't know how much you're into the Enneagram, but I'm an Enneagram eight. I process things a lot of times through my body, and I felt that. I felt that writing the book, the whole experience of just getting this book out, it felt very similar to me, to delivering my children the whole process of being pregnant. And it just feels like I was pregnant for 20 years and then I finally delivered this child, right? It is all very tangible to me. It's very physical to me. That was very true. Writing this book, it's still true sometimes talking about it. And so yes, I think I am still processing the tragedy and the loss and the sorrow, but with that and the trauma, but with that also comes these blessings of faith and hope and a sort of persistence that I carry with me. And as part of that legacy that I have inherited from my matriarchs and from my foremothers, all of that is absolutely wrapped up in this work and in the ongoing experience of it.
Charlotte Donlon
And I think it's important to also mention how generational trauma is very real, but so is generational healing. Yes. And when you find healing, you are helping those who came before you find healing. And helping your daughter.
Lelya King
Yes.
Charlotte Donlon
Do you have thoughts on that?
Lelya King
Yes. I think a hundred percent generational trauma is real. And I'm so glad that we as a culture and a society are finally beginning to name that and articulate that and understand that and take that into consideration as we trying try and sort things out in the dumpster fire that we are living in. So I'm grateful for that. I think what we have not yet articulated as a society and a culture is what you just named that while generational trauma is very real and true and has to be grappled with, so is generational healing, but also generational joy and generational faith and generational hope, right? And generational love and that sense of our human capacity to survive and to thrive, even when we have experienced really traumatic, awful, horrific things that is also part of the sort of almost genetic, I want to use the term genetic. It feels genetic, the genetic legacy that has been handed on to me, and that whoever you are and wherever you find yourself, whatever line of ancestors you come from, you have that too, right? So I wish as a society that we also paid attention to that because while it is a hundred percent true that generational trauma is a real thing that we experience physically at times, so are all these other gifts of our ancestry that come along with the generational trauma as the balance for it and the redemption of it.
Charlotte Donlon
Yeah. That's beautiful. Thank you for providing more thoughts on that. Yeah, I'd love to hear another excerpt from the book, just any excerpt you want to read right now that feels appropriate.
Lelya King
Sure.
Let me read, I read a bit from the end of the book. So let me read from the very beginning of the book, and this is the end of the first chapter. So this is from my grandmother's voice. So her name is Bahi, and this is her speaking, and she's speaking in, I think it's June of 2002 from her home in Houston, Texas. And in this moment that she's speaking, I am there as my just recently graduated self, recently graduated from college self. As we sit down together to start this work of recording her stories as a name, Layla evokes the beauty of a dark night. It's ironic, really then that she should be so fair. So light-skinned El the fair one, my mother, a may, she rest in peace called Layla when she first held her great-grandchild. Later when she was a toddler, Layla would stand before my mother and they would talk to one another mama speaking only Arabic, having lost her grasp of other languages in her old age.
And Layla understanding only her native English, but they were enamored of each other nonetheless. Mama I know was taken by her fair skinned, great granddaughter, and Layla, what do we know of a child's mind? Perhaps even then, even in over differences of language and culture, she was collecting the stories, retaining their power in her small body to grow within her, even as she grew and grow. She did into this girl, this young woman sitting before me tentatively rolling her Rs and tasting the majestic thaw of the Arabic language now and then as we talk still in English, but with the seasoning of the Arabic that she has worked so hard to begin to gather to herself, she repeats the names of the towns and villages I tell her about to make sure she gets them right, Beirut.
And she spends minutes forming the names of her ancestors on her tongue, just so Anisa w Amin. Yes. We start with laughing now in the comfort of my own home with steaming cups of tea before us, and the promise of the cookies I made yesterday awaiting us in the kitchen. We share these stories to be recorded and retained and remembered with joy and thankfulness, but it wasn't always that way. There was much suffering too, to get to this place, this moment with laity, there was first pain and heartache and so much loss and grief and upset. Yes, upset and sorrow. We start with laughing now, but before that first there was Sally.
Charlotte Donlon
Wonderful. Thank you.
Is there anything else you'd like to share about how the stories that you've collected in this book have formed you and or how you hope these stories will form your children and subsequent generations?
Lelya King
Gosh, that's another big question. I think I, writing this book, these stories were always inside of me for two decades. They have been inside of me. So it's hard to separate out the process of writing and sharing them with the world from the fact that they have always been a part of me or for so long that they have been such a big part of me. And I think the impact of writing them and sharing them with other people is just that it just feels really good in the eucharistic prayer that we say in the church, there's this phrase that it is meat and right so to do, and it feels very neat and right to do this now. And there is, I think for me, the thing that is forming my identity is the right now is the process of getting to share these stories with the world.
And I don't know how that is forming me yet because it feels like it is still happening. So I am not yet at a point where I can reflect on that, although I'm eager to get to that point and have a chance to reflect on that. And I hope that the impact for future generations will primarily be that we will not be in this place now that we are now, where Palestinians, where Arabs, to a larger extent, are viewed as some other species, as some other thing that is lesser than human. And I really feel that is where we are in this moment. And it causes such grief, and it is such a thing to realize that one aspect of who I am being Westerner is in such tension and at such conflict with the other aspect of who I am. So my hope for this book is that it will be part of the work that transforms how the Western world views Middle Easterners generally speaking, and Arabs and Palestinians more specifically, which is a big hope. That's where I am. I hope it's a contribution to that arc and that hope overall.
Charlotte Donlon
Yeah, that's my hope too. And I feel pretty good about it. I think it will be a contribution. What are some practical things that others can do to support Palestinian Americans and Palestinians in general right now? People in the church and everyone?
Lelya King
Yeah. I get this question a lot, and it's a hard question, I think because we want to feel like we're making an immediate impact, in part because the horrors that we see unfolding are just indescribable, that people are literally being murdered through starvation is unthinkable and everything inside of me, and I'm sure inside of you and inside of any listener wants that to stop and seize the evil in that and wants to make that stop. And we can't. I do not have any power. You do not have any power to make that stop immediately, which is just a tragedy, but is the truth. And it can leave us feeling, I think so powerless and despairing that it then prevents us from doing anything because we know that anything we do cannot stop immediately this horror that is taking place in front of our eyes, and we have to do something right, and we have to keep the longer term vision in our mind's eye.
So the other thing I say is that I think the role of discernment is really important here. There's that old Frederick Beaker quote that your vocation is where your deep joy meets the deep hunger of the world or something like that. I probably butchered that, but you get the main idea. And for this context, I would nuance that a little bit to say you have to discern where your skills are, where things that nourish you can also work towards some transformation in the longer term. I have some very dear friends who I so admire and appreciate, and I'm thankful for whose temperaments and sort of belief systems and the way they operate in the world makes them very good at organizing or taking part in protests and justice walks and those sorts of things. That is fantastic, and I'm so glad that they are doing that work.
And I know very clearly that is not work. I'm called to, I get nervous in an overcrowded elevator. So a protest is not going to be particularly nourishing for me. In fact, it will really drain me and it probably won't do much good in the world. In my case, where I am better suited is doing stuff like this, telling these stories, whether it's through a podcast or in a presentation, or through a book, that is something that I can do that gives me life and also makes a contribution, and hopefully makes an impact in the long run. So I would really encourage people to think about and do that discernment work before you jump in with two feet into anything so that it becomes sustainable in the long run because it's got to be sustainable because this is for the long run. We have to keep that long-term vision in front of our eyes.
That being said, the one thing I think everyone can do is listen, be a good listener. Seek out stories of people who are different from you, even if the difference is one. That means you are a liberal and you need to seek out the stories and the voices of people who are maga Christians, right? Seek out those stories of people who are different from you. And also seek out the stories of people who are people you're not hearing from. And so those may be two different groups of people. Like you may not be hearing from Palestinian Christians much, but their viewpoint may actually not be all that different from yours. So I think it's really important to do both things, to learn how to become a good listener, to develop that muscle of empathy and become an active listener. Ask questions, be curious about where other people are coming from. And then when you find a story that makes an impact on you, that transforms your mind and heart in any way that you learn something from, share it with other people. So that impact can have ripple effects. You can share it on social media. You can share it on one-to-one conversations. Give a platform to these voices that have changed you and shaped you and hand that gift on whatever that story is and whatever that voice may sound like.
Charlotte Donlon
Thank you. Thank you for that encouragement and advice. Thanks. Hopefully it's good. Oh, it's wonderful. I really appreciate it. Is there anything else you'd like to share about your book or anything else before we wrap up?
Lelya King
Yeah, please buy the book. It's not about the money and fame for me. It's really so important to me that these stories are out there. Please buy the book and share it with people. This is one of those stories that I think one of those voices that I think isn't heard. And I would love for my grandmother's voice to be out there and for her story to be heard by more and more people. So that's one thing I would say. The other thing I would say is that I'm such an open book. I love hearing from people about where they are. The biggest part I think of my vocation as a priest is that I actually really love listening to people, and I'm so curious about where people are and how they're affected by me and by the world around them. I have a website, you can find it by going to layla king.com or thankful priest.com. Either one works, hit that contact button, send me a message. And I love being in touch with people.
Charlotte Donlon
Wonderful. Thanks so much for having this conversation with me. I'm really excited to see how your book makes its way into the world and how people receive the stories and how these stories transform. So thank you.
Lelya King
Thanks so much, Charlotte. It was a real pleasure.