First published in Sight Magazine, 22 October 2025
“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us,just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus,so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.” – Luke 1:1-4 (NIV)
During a recent trip to my birthplace in north Lebanon, I distributed copies of my 144-page book on our family genealogy to 40 cousins.
The book was not a family tree of who ‘begot’ who as in Matthew 1:1-17. It was a narrative on the legacies of our ancestors, spanning three centuries.
My great-grandfather Sassine was repeatedly imprisoned for his armed resistance in the dying days of the Ottoman occupation. His fearless wife Sa’eeda once threw a rope to hoist him over the 12-metre prison wall. During other jailbreaks, Sassine survived with bullet holes in his ’aabayya (robe). In Arabic, both Sassine and Sa’eeda mean joyful or blessed
My great-grandmother Sa’eeda did it again during World War II when the pro-Nazi Vichy French Forces invaded Lebanon. When these troops approached our snow-capped village to pillage ‘free food’, Sa’eeda rode out on horseback, wielding a helmet, sword and shield: “Not one grain of wheat shall leave this village!” Behind her was an army of women ready to ‘break some bones’ with their canes. My father recalls the collaboration between the villagers and the ‘friendly’ Australian army, which expelled the Vichy Forces in 1941.
As Sa’eeda was about 50-years-old when she married Sassine, she was praying for a child. She made the 12-hour pilgrimage from Bekaakafra to the monk (Saint) Charbel at his hermitage in Annaya. She begged him for a sign, and he made the sign of the cross: she gave birth to her only child a year later.
Sa’eeda was aged 94 years and I was aged two when my family migrated to Australia.
Throughout my childhood, I kept hearing variations of these incredible stories from disparate sources in Australia and Lebanon. For decades, I recorded ‘interviews’ with illiterate elders who may have been eyewitnesses to these stories. I was struck by their acute memories and verbatim accounts. Their eyes lit up, they waved their fingers, re-enacted what Saeeda said, and ‘swore’ that their version was the truth. This enabled me to record this oral history for posterity (Luke 1:4).
The journey has been both emotional and spiritual.
Emotional because genealogy can be abruptly amputated or gradually dissolved with the passage of migration. As much as I was blessed with a safe and prosperous new homeland, I felt robbed of ancestral roots and identity; robbed of experiencing the warmth, wisdom and love of grandparents and great-grandparents.
When I handed them the book, my Lebanese cousins kept asking: Where did you dig this up from? They knew that written records were scarce and that ancestry websites were fruitless for people of the Levant.
Which leads me to the spiritual journey. The answer to my cousins’ question evoked a newfound awe of Luke 1:1-4. This Gospel writer was not an eyewitness, but he “carefully investigated” the accounts that were “handed down to us”, so he could “write an orderly account”.
Just when I thought that this journey was over, my family rediscovered a dusty box of reel-to-reel tapes from 60 years ago. We hit play: the four-track analogue tapes contained clear voices of yearning, poetry, songs and stories. The impossible happened: I finally heard the voice of my great-grandmother Sa’eeda! We wept as the ‘reel resurrection’ filled the room. There she was, telling her own story in her own accent.
This was a privilege not afforded to Luke when he documented the ‘certainty of things’, about 60 years after the ‘real Resurrection’.
We don’t choose our genes, but we may lose sight of our genes when we migrate. Sometimes, we need to dig deep, listen like Luke, and bottle them.