What the Candle Knows

Spirituality, grief and the long road after loss

Nadia Boulos2 episodes2 min of audio244 playsEpisodic

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S1 · E2Aug 20, 20260:54156 plays Preview

A Druze father and the question he stopped asking

Kamal Abu Shakra lost his daughter to leukaemia at nine. He talks with Nadia about Druze beliefs on reincarnation, the comfort and the cruelty in them, and the question he finally let go.

S1 · E1Mar 9, 20261:0088 plays Members

The forty days, and what came after

Nadia tells her own story: the August 2020 explosion, the forty days of mourning that held her up, and the eighteen months after when the rituals ended and her faith went quiet.

About the show

What the Candle Knows is a fortnightly show about grief and the spiritual life, made by someone who lost her brother in the Beirut port explosion and spent three years finding out what her faith could and could not hold. Nadia Boulos is a Maronite Catholic who trained as a grief counsellor after that loss and now works with bereaved families across Lebanon of every confession. Each 40-minute episode is a single long conversation with one person who has lost someone, a mother, a widower, a young man who lost his best friend, a priest who buried his own father, about what they believed before, what they believe now, and what rituals, prayers, silences or doubts carried them. The show is not tidy and does not rush toward comfort. It is for the grieving and for the people trying to sit with them, of any faith or none.

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