AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast

Samson: One of the Bible’s Strangest Stories with Mahri Leonard-Fleckman

Sometimes on this show, host Mike Jordan Laskey has topic in mind he’d like to cover and then he goes and finds someone great to talk about it. Other times, he knows he wants to talk to a specific person because they’re brilliant and Mike doesn’t really care what the topic is. Whatever the guest wants to discuss will be interesting. Today’s episode is this latter type of show. Dr. Mahri Leonard-Fleckman teaches at the College of the Holy Cross, where she’s an associate professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and Classics. She’s an Old Testament scholar, and first came on the show about four years ago to talk about the Book of Ecclesiastes and King David. Mike wrote her recently and asked what’s fascinating her these days. And that’s how we have come to have an episode about Samson, that strong guy with the long hair from the Book of Judges. Mahri has been researching the history of Samson, how this bizarre Biblical character came to be and how interpretations about him have shifted through centuries. Mahri’s research has way deeper concerns than the surface-level story of Samson – she uses the story to reflect on the nature of Biblical biography writ large. Where do these larger-than-life characters come from and what do they mean? How do cultures receive and interpret sacred texts over generations? After hearing form Mahri, you won’t think about Samson the same way ever again. Mahri Leonard-Fleckman, Ph.D.: https://www.holycross.edu/academics/programs/religious-studies/faculty/mahri-leonard-fleckman Mahri’s “Ponder: Contemplative Bible Study”: https://litpress.org/Products/PONDERSET/Ponder-Complete-Set?srsltid=AfmBOopdlMpTTpBbZ-ug-XsSwHtMz-zSQYcBLkw3BBr6-h8AcDpI1Szl World Day of Migrants and Refugees Audio Reflection Series: https://sites.ignatiansolidarity.net/world-refugee-day-website AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. www.jesuits.org/ www.beajesuit.org/ twitter.com/jesuitnews facebook.com/Jesuits instagram.com/wearethejesuits youtube.com/societyofjesus www.jesuitmedialab.org/

Broadcast on:: 18 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) From the Jesuit Media Lab, this is AMDG. I'm Mike Jordan-Lasky. Sometimes on this show, I have a topic in mind that I'd like to cover. And then I go and find someone great to talk about it. Other times, I know that I wanna talk to a specific person because they're brilliant and I don't really care what the topic is. I know that whatever they want to discuss will be interesting. And today's episode is this latter type of show. Dr. Mari Leonard Fleckman teaches at the college of the Holy Cross, where she's an associate professor in the departments of religious studies and classics. She's an Old Testament scholar. And she first came on the show about four years ago to talk about the book of Ecclesiastes and King David. So I emailed her recently and asked, what's fascinating you these days? And that's how we've come to have an episode about Samson, that strong guy with the long hair from the book of judges. Mari has been researching the history of Samson and how this bizarre biblical character came to be. Also, how interpretations about him have shifted through the centuries. I had never really thought about Samson that much until preparing for our conversation. And now I can't stop thinking about him. And Mari's research has way deeper concerns than the surface level story of Samson. She uses the story to reflect on the nature of biblical biography writ large. Where do these larger-than-life characters come from and what do they mean? How do cultures receive and interpret sacred texts over generations? After hearing from Mari, you won't think about Samson the same way ever again. You can subscribe to AMDG wherever you get podcasts. And thanks for joining us. (gentle music) - Professor Mari Leonard Fleckman, welcome back to AMDG. Thank you so much for checking the time. How are you? - I'm doing well. Thank you very much for having me. - No, it's great to have you. We had you on a few years ago. It was a lot of fun. We did some Hebrew scripture talk on Ecclesiastes and I think King David and a Psalm. Yeah, we had a lot of fun. It was good. I wrote to you and I said, what are you into in Hebrew scripture now? Like, what's your big thing? And you're like, oh, Samson's interesting. I was like, great, let's do it. And Samson is an interesting, you know, I have like the, what is it, like the cartoon image in my head of like strong guy whose hair gets cut, building, falling down, like not much. So maybe we could start just like, it's such a wild story. Tell us a little bit about Samson just like on the page from Book of Judges and then we'll get into why you find him worth kind of thinking about and wrestling with today. - Sure. So Samson, he appears, he has three chapters dedicated to him in the Old Testament and he's in the Book of Judges, which itself is this very wild kind of quirky set of stories, some really old stories about local heroic figures or savior figures, not always people you wanna emulate in your life and he appears towards the end of this whole batch of figures. And his story is not really a single story. It's this kind of fragmented series of tales where he shapeshifts and kind of enters in and has really different kinds of personalities. It's I think from my perspective, from anyone reading him, especially if someone has a kind of a religious perspective, there's a real question of why he ended up in the Bible in the first place who wrote him, what's the point? He certainly really rarely appears in the electionary and the Roman Catholic electionary, rarely appears in the Jewish, you know, electionary. So, he's a little bit of an enigma, I think, in the Old Testament. I mean, there are a lot of crazy figures in the Old Testament, but he is certainly one at the top. - Right, and you say it's probably not someone who existed as a human in real life. - Yes, that is what I believe. (laughs) - Is that debated? - I mean, among more mainstream folks, it's not really debated. It would only be debated if you are a kind of a literalist about the text, which, yeah. - Sure, but again, in my mind, he's the strong guy who was done in by this mean woman, right? Which is obviously a lot of the inherited thing that's in the background, but a lot more going on. They're starting from the story that does make it into the electionary, as you write in recent talk you gave on him that you shared with me, is that his divine birth, so kind of echoing Jesus for Christians there, but that kind of shows up at the beginning, but isn't something that strongly follows him through them the rest of his literary life in the books of Judges? - Yeah, that's right. And I should just say too that the, I mean, the whole reason why I got interested in Samson was because I was asked to do a short commentary on the book of Judges for the kind of latest iteration of the New Jerome Bible commentary, which is this kind of one-volume commentary for students. Also, it's also used by people preparing for homilies and things like that. And so there's certainly, it's written by a scripture scholar, so a lot of it is critical, contextual, thinking, but there's also this, in the background is a kind of, well, what does this mean for us, or how would you preach this sort of thing? And so I had to really struggle with how you would do that with a figure like this, let alone the whole book. And that's why I became interested in him in the first place. And that first chapter is the easiest one to really figure out because it's this kind of divine birth story. And it's one, it is the only story that appears in the electionary cycle. It's a story that ends up overall kinds of stained glass windows and churches, for Christians. It looks like an echo of Jesus' divine birth. And so that's the one we can really sink our teeth into in some ways, but it's also kind of, I hate to say it, it's also a little bit boring compared to the rest of the stories of the cycle. - Right, so I mean, there's then, from there, a move to like, yeah, I mean, Jesus, one thing he doesn't do is kill people with animal bones, right? I mean, like, so, yeah, what happens kind of next? Like walk us through the like very close notes version, at least some of the details that for you like invited the most, like, I kind of want to dig into this. - Sure, so it's, he basically has a series of short stories that read a little bit like campfire legends, I would say. And so he has this divine birth story and then it disappears in the background. And suddenly he's this adult and he, you know, desires this random woman who doesn't, she's anonymous, most of the women in this, the Samson cycle, we call it, are anonymous. And he, you know, gets his parents to allow him to marry this woman who is seemingly this foreign woman. And he, you know, ends up on the way to marry her, like finds this lion, tears it apart with his bare hands. And then suddenly we're a year later where he's coming upon the carcass and he's pulling out all of this honey and eating the honey from the remains. And this is actually, it's a very interesting story because it's probably, it's a timeless motif. We have it with all the way back to, you know, like the third millennium BCE, which is the, you know, 2000s BCE where of just, you know, images and murals about heroes taming lions. And story of Gilgamesh does this. We've got, you know, later Heracles in the Greek tradition. So he kind of enters into this timeless space of these weird heroes, heroic tales, you know, and then he kind of marries this woman and ends up this party scene, this marriage party scene goes horribly wrong and ends up, you know, riddle gone bad, ends up in a massacre of a bunch of people at the party. He loses the woman, he comes back to reclaim her, he doesn't get her and then he basically destroys a bunch of fields and anger by lighting fox tails on fire and letting them out on the vineyards. And it's normal, it's normal behavior. - Yeah, I mean, again, just strange, right? Strange story, you know, there's more, you know, he then ends up, you know, kind of murdering another batch of people. And then eventually we land in the very last story of the cycle, which is the one that people know the best probably, which is Delilah, all about Delilah. And she's had the greatest interpretive footprints where she's actually, she's been fairly exploited in a way, her image in a sexual way, but she basically tricks him. He falls in love with her, another woman he falls in love with and then she basically tricks him, although it's a little too easy to trick him into telling her the secret of where his power is in his body, which turns out to be in his hair. And long story short, she lulls him to sleep on her knees according to Hebrew translations or between her knees, according to Greek, the Greek translations. And then, you know, the so-called enemy, the Philistines come in, chop off his hair and then basically take him prisoner down to the coastline, down to Gaza, where he is kind of humiliated in front of them and then can eventually commit suicide and mass murder. And that's the end. - And that's the end. So yeah, I think like the, so the first question, maybe go back a little bit, even to, you know, this first woman in the wedding scene and the, the question is like, why, like, why is this here? Why is it included? Is there something about the fact that she was a far, from the Philistines, so like an enemy maybe? And so just like underlining some of the tensions here? Or yeah, well, so what do we know about why this is included in the canon and what, what we can be learning here? - I think there are a couple of ways to think about this. One is if we look at the final, what we would call the final form of the text and how judges fits into the Old Testament, a pretty common way of explaining what's happening in the book of judges from that perspective is that it is demonstrating how when you don't have kingship or you don't have a kind of a centralized authority, things can go horribly wrong. And so the very people who are supposed to be savior figures can transform things into utter chaos. Now, kings can do that too. But that's the way that that's the whole cycle and the way that Samson kind of lands at the end of the book of judges is in a way to make space for the advent of monarchy that happens for Christians a couple of books later in the books of Samuel, for Jews a book later in the book of Samuel. So that's a pretty common explanation. I think if we're just looking at his stories in particular, they take place in a really a liminal space of Southwest Israel, Palestine, where it's kind of between the central highlands, the area that we would designate as kind of Judah, Judah height or Judean and the coastlands which were the space of the kind of quintessential other figure that we label very simplistically as the Philistines. And so all of the stories take place in between in an area called the Shafala, which means the lowlands. And so it's really, it's very unclear who people are in that space. So there's a playfulness amidst the drama and the slaughtering that happens in there about just the mixtures of populations and peoples. And even Samson, it's not really clear who he is or where he belongs. But the enemy in that set of stories are the Philistines. And meanwhile, Samson kind of roams around and we don't really know where he belongs and we don't really know where any of the women belong. Delilah's never labeled as Philistine or as a Judah height. This woman from Timna in Timna, it's never really clear whether that space is a space that would be labeled Judean or Philistine. So I think there is something happening in terms of thinking about people's identities and some of the problems that can arise when you're kind of crossing from your home space into another space. - And you read about how kind of given all of this that we know and things, how things have changed, that there is no figure, maybe no figure, you say that it has been the subject of more disparate interpretations. And you quote another scholar, Cheryl Exham, who says that he can be anything from a heroic fool to a foolish hero to a trickster, tragic wild man, comic bandit, tragic comic trickster terrorist, foolish freedom fighter type of Israel fool for love, Nazarite judge, negative example and hero of the faith. So like how do you begin to unpack all of that? Is it clear that the text is kind of putting anything forward or like what are some of the, again, the traditions even kind of since then that have evolved? And one of the things you do in your talk to you is refer to a lot of different kind of cultural depictions from ancient ones all the way up to kind of more modern depictions of Samson who's still again in our imagination. So what do we do with all of these different modes and how have they shifted through history? - So I'll give you some of the key modes. I think what I have come to appreciate about Samson and a lot of the work that I do is about history and questions about history writing and how history itself is a kind of a living force that remains open to interpretation just like tradition is. You know, and there's always something that you can kind of pick back up that can become the cornerstone of something entirely new if it existed at one time and you remember it or kind of revitalize it. And so because he has all of these different dimensions, all of those different dimensions can be or any of them can be picked up and reused at one time or another. And there have been a few key spaces for him. One is one of the main ways that he has been reused is as a kind of person who demonstrates rage and destruction as a way of, I don't know if destroying one's enemies is the right word or kind of imagining the overturning of the system among marginalized people is really the way that's best to describe it. So for example, he, in a couple of places in Roman occupied kind of northern spaces of Israel in the upper Galilee in the fourth to sixth century CE, we have the remains from a couple of different synagogues in that space. One is called Hucoque, one is called Kerbaut Wadi Hamam where we have uncovered all of these floor mosaics and among those floor mosaics, there are three different images of Samson and the images that have been used in these synagogues are from his most kind of gruesome acts of rage. Like murdering people, setting fire to these vineyards with the use of fox tails, you know, going down to Gaza and basically lifting out city gates and just walking away with them on his shoulders, which is another utterly ridiculous tale. So that's one way and Christians have done that too during the Renaissance period. He was allegorized or the field-torching scene was heavily allegorized as an instant of him acting as God's agent to rid the world of wickedness and the church of heretics. And Milton played with this whole idea in his very famous Samson Agonistes. So that's one space and, you know, another one is his final acts and his final acts at the end of the story when he commits mass murder and suicide. That particular scene has been reused in a lot of different ways and it's been interpreted either as a tragic and shameful downfall, as a punishment for his weakness to foreign women. It's been viewed as an act of terrorism. So after 9/11, Norman Mailer referred to him, referred to the kind of suicide terrorist as Muslim Sampson's, that's one example, but also as a great act of martyrdom and heroism. So it's been very much reused and re-appropriated in African American history. That final act made him an icon for anyone who would challenge racial oppression. So those are, you know, just a few different ways that people have stepped into the Samson cycle. It's almost like looking at an object through a kaleidoscope where every time you turn the kaleidoscope, something else appears. - We'll get back to my conversation with Mari Leonard Fleckman after this special message I wanted to share. The Catholic Church in the U.S. observes National Migration Week this year from September 23rd to the 29th. Join the Jesuit Migration Network of the U.S. and Canada for a week of prayer and reflection, culminating on the world day of migrants and refugees. We'll be sharing six 15-minute audio reflections that share the stories of migrants and the Jesuit ministries that accompany them. This year's theme, which is chosen by Pope Francis, is God Walks with His People. To help us dive into the theme, our audio reflections are filled with moments of prayer, stories of hardship and hope, and opportunities to contemplate God's presence in the journeys of others and in our own journeys. Whether you listen during your morning commute on your midday walk or as part of your evening prayer, we invite you to pray with us as we reflect on how God walks with his people. May these stories inspire each of us to better accompany our neighbors in need. We'll put the link to the series in the show notes. Okay, now back to my conversation with Mari Leonard Fleckman. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - He also doesn't seem to be, I mean, would you call him like, there's some tones of misogyny in there, right? I mean, the way women play our play. So like the relationship between, yeah, Samson and the women and the women kind of seen as objects, you don't hear much about them, but like through the chaos kind of comes through his connection with these women. So yeah, what have you learned about, again, the role of the women in the story? And maybe this is where we could talk to you a little bit about Delilah and her cultural footprint. - Yeah, so I've spent a fair amount of time with the women of the Samson cycle because they have also fascinated me because we spend so much time talking about Samson, but at every space in the cycle of stories, there's a woman. And they're four women total. The first is his mother, you know, and then the second is this unnamed woman from around Timna, his first wife or possibly betrothed, it's hard to know. Then there is this woman who's called a prostitute from Gaza that appears in just three verses and then she disappears. And then there's Delilah. So interestingly, there are four women, three are anonymous, only one is named and that one who is named has been so hypersexualized in the history of interpretation, especially in art. She appears all over the landscape of art history. And so a key, you know, for example, Peter Paul Rubin has an image named Delilah which shows her with her breast sun cover and that's a pretty common way of seeing her. And there's this more recent late 20th century rendering from Avi Katz's, he has this series called the Alien Corn Series, which is very strange. I would recommend looking it up. And she is like on her knees very suggestively with, you know, Samson on the bed. And I mean, so it's almost, you know, what I'll show these images in class or at conferences and I give a trigger warning because they all, I mean, they're, you know, there can be a little bit difficult to look at. But so the women are everywhere and they basically run the narrative. And then there's this, you know, the other one is this woman from Timna who takes up the most space in the Samson narrative. But she's actually physically burned out of the story because she is, you know, viewed as a threat by the Philistines who somehow in the end connect her to Samson even though she was in the end denied Samson. So, and they burn her alive, her and her entire family. So it's a very uncomfortable story. She's literally burned out of the narrative and she's been kind of burned out of the history of interpretation. I'd like to think because people are a little bit uncomfortable with that, you know, story but there, but, you know, maybe that is true. Maybe that is not. One exception is this very eerie image from Rembrandt that depicts her in the middle of this feasting scene. And she's sitting there in the center kind of unmoving and unreadable amid all of this movement around her and this light shining directly on her as she stares fixedly back at you, you know, at the audience. And that's about it. - Yeah, and I think again of my, like, the little knowledge I have from Catechism as a kid or like, however I heard about Samson is that he's the hero and like, she's a betrayer and it's like pretty simplistic in that space. Though again, the story is a lot thornier. Again, it seems like she tries to trick him a bunch of times and he doesn't catch on entirely. So there's stuff happening that suggests that there's some subtext here that's beyond just the, yeah, this person, you're kind of tricking the hero, the tragic hero. So yeah, what else have you kind of uncovered about? What do you think is happening here? - Well, I have one great question is what, whoever created these different narratives, what they were trying to do with this figure of Samson and of course we can never know and what we try to do with the figure of Samson is all over the place. But there are, you know, a couple of arguments that number one, people, whoever his anonymous scribal makers were poking fun at him. They were making fun of this figure as someone who is easily trickable, who is outlandish, who is this strong man without a whole lot of thinking skills, you know, quite impulsive, quite reactive. And if someone, anyone, let alone a woman, can quote unquote trick, you know, in scare quotes, a man by asking him multiple times, what is the source of your strength? And when you, you know, and when he, you know, he makes up some comment in the beginning and then it's very clear that this is a purposeful act to try to catch him and kind of take him prisoner and he somehow doesn't catch on and eventually gives up. I mean, it's in some ways more about his ridiculousness than anything else, the whole cycle of stories and the women just underscore that. - But you also too, like, write about how you're interested then in this composition, kind of reflecting on it as a piece of literature, as is it biography? When I pick up a biography of a character, like I want to see their arc, you know, from their beginning, you know, I want the details of how they became, who they are, I want to see kind of what their life is about. I want cohesion, character development, explanation of inner experience as you write. And those are not things that we get here. So I am curious to think of thinking about this again, as a biography, this, again, the cycles, the word you've been using. What does it say about how these characters are put together in scripture? What do we learn about the writers and the communities that have, you know, birthed these figures and these stories? - Well, he, you know, there is, so like you say, there are a few elements to what we would consider to be a good biography as contemporary readers that are completely missing in the Samson cycle or are, you know, generally missing. First of all, he's not real. Okay, so that's a problem. We're talking about a biography. Second of all, we don't have a biographer. There's no named author or statement of purpose. And he was put together over a long period of time. And then he breaks apart, we want, we do want some moral arcs, some trajectory, some idea of inner experience. He's completely fragmented. And, but in that sense, he's like a lot of biblical characters and like a lot of biblical literature is our stories that are brought together and composed of fragments. There is a way of seeing those fragments as a whole, as narrative art. And in his, the final form of his stories, there is a kind of a narrative art from the beginning, this kind of heroic birth story until this final culminating moment of his death. And it's brought together very clearly by a final editor who does, you know, sew that together in a way into the book as a whole. But, you know, what's really remarkable about Samson and what's also remarkable about the vocal texts is that they have a steady stream of discourse within them. They preserve this because they're written over time and because scribe seemed more interested in preserving a kind of a cacophony of views, which can make us uncomfortable. But I don't think it made ancient audiences uncomfortable. I think it was more important to them than preserving a kind of a consistent view of things. And this is really what makes biblical narratives fascinating to think of as history because it preserves so much and it can be reused in so many ways. And also what makes tradition itself remarkable. And I, you know, I have, I love this quote from Grisham Scholom, you know, the great like kind of father of Jewish mysticism. And he, you know, he talked about how tradition was this vibrant and living force that was diverse and full of contradictions. And he said that the purpose of tradition was to hold the contradictions and I'll quote him with astounding seriousness and intrepidity as if to say that one can never know whether a view at one time rejected may not one day become the cornerstone of an entirely new edifice. So there are all of these, in other words, you know, tradition, biblical tradition, have these kinds of changing modes of existence. And they're possible because so many different views are preserved in, within the record themselves. So, you know, so all of that is to say that Samson does not function potentially like we would want him to function from the perspective of what a biography is and does. And yet he really does underscore what's so remarkable about history that it's this kind of vibrant living force that's open to possibility. - And I'm thinking then we're reading it today and reflecting on his story today and you're teaching it. In a, like, so the post like Me Too era and we're wondering about how not just individual, like men treat women in these, then like how cultures have like kind of pushed women characters or made them caricatures or pushed them to the side or not kind of centered their stories or how the women function in this story. And so we're thinking about like kind of patriarchal questions around church and scripture. We're thinking, also you mentioned again, part of it takes place in Gaza city, the ancient city with the question of different kind of groups interacting in violent ways. So that certainly is we're reading like on our minds and hearts as we were talking about it today. - Absolutely. - There's just, right. So like the, and then thinking again, obviously the way Samson has been used in racial justice context as well. There's just a lot that continues to be relevant and feels like in this story or thing. So I'm curious today, like what as, you know, what are, like when you're working with students about kind of reading these texts in 2024, what are some of the things that you kind of invite them to do to how do we approach this as people interested in the history and the theology and in kind of the world we're living in today? - That's a such a loaded question, Mike. I try to, I mean, the first thing I do with students, the simplest thing and the hardest thing is I just want them to be practicing close reading, which is very hard for them to do. So we just read things really closely. And I just, rather than trying to impart upon them something in particular, I just let whatever it is that they notice arise. And when they do read closely, all this stuff emerges. I mean, especially I would say the gender questions, the questions of like how women are treated in particular, violence, you know, issues of violence and othering, all of these things come up. And we, so we try to try to kind of approach the texts with what I call a spirit of generosity to their ancient context and trying to tap into the mystery and just get curious about what those contexts were, why it was created, why it was passed down over time of getting them to think about history and its possibilities in the past. And then I bring up, I show them all of this stuff in his history of interpretation. We look at art, you know, we look at different texts, we look at religious tradition. And I think that just invites people to, and then in the end, I think the big thing is how questions about how we read these, how we read these characters responsibly today. And of course, I have my reflections on that, but they're very open and they're really changing. And what's remarkable is that students, I mean, these young people tend to be really thoughtful. They have great ideas about what you can do with an ancient text, whether it's how not to live, you know, or some way that we can, I don't know, restore it, or point to some value that's there that we might not originally see. Like, for example, what if some scribe was creating some of these women in the Samson cycle specifically so that we would have compassion for people who are kind of marginalized and abused. I mean, who knows? But, you know, I did have a student suggest that once. So. - Hmm. Yeah, I guess it brings us like that big question about why you do what you do. These ancient texts that are, again, at the heart of a community, not just texts, but these things that people pray around and haven't, again, have passed down in different forms. There's just so much to dig into here. And I guess it's just like a softball of like, to convince people why they should study scripture in this kind of, it's really study it today, especially again in a, I don't know, a time when the liberal arts seem to be under threat at everywhere you look. Yeah, what about it? What do you love about kind of this general, this work? Which seems to be, again, combining history, theology, literature, anthropology, archeology. There's just so much going on here. So, yeah, make your pitch. - Well, at, you know, Holy Cross, we have this wonderful mission statement at Holy Cross and what it is that we want to be doing with students. And one of my favorite phrases in that mission statement that I latch onto for my classes is that we're trying to teach people to be, you know, patient with ambiguity and uncertainty. And I think about that a lot with the book text. I think we have sometimes a pretty narrow view of what a religious text should be that it's about some moral prescription for right living or something like that. The reality is we are, when you are a religious person, it, it suffuses you in every aspect, you know, that if there is a sense of the divine, it permeates every part of life. It's everywhere. It's not a space we walk into in a church one day a week and then walk out of. And so if that is the case, if our whole world is a space of God and holiness, then that also means that all the ugliness in this world is somehow suffused with that too. Like it's, you know, and I think in the biblical writers we're not afraid of showing us all of the complexities and the workiness of life and making us grapple with that stuff and find the spaces of the divine in that. And so that's what I tell my students over and over again is that if they, if they can read the Bible closely, they can get a real sense of the human condition. And, you know, where God is in the messiness of life. - I just think as you're describing this and like that kind of ambiguity, I think that the character Ned Flanders in The Simpsons, you know, who's super devout and at one point his life is not going well. And he prays and says, "I've done everything the Bible says, "even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff." Again, that set like any impression we would have that this was kind of a straightforward, like a moralistic prescription, just like have to sit with the text it seems like and so much wildness is such a wild collection of stories and texts and not tameable. And I just think there is always that temptation to be like, oh, we know exactly what this says and what this means and why it's there. And it's not the case. - That's true. The world is not tameable. I like that word. - Yeah. So folks who might be interested in kind of studying scripture along with you in a way, even if they can't be in your class, might be interested in one of the things you've worked on in the past few years, the ponder contemplative Bible study, three volumes goes through all the Sunday readings. So yeah, can you just tell us a little bit about that? And we can link to see where folks can get that from the surgical press, but it looks like a really cool collection. - Sure, it's, yeah, it's a series. It goes through the three year cycle on Sundays and it gives the readings themselves. Unfortunately, we've lost the Psalms for issues of space because it would make it too expensive to purchase, but the other readings are there and then I provide pretty context, really important context, sometimes language, issues of language and translation. And then at the very end, we have what we call ponders, which are these kind of three bullet points that are for further reflection or can offer material for a homily, that sort of thing. So it's for personal Bible study, it's for groups, it's used in groups, it's used by a lot of priests, also preparing for Sunday. - Yeah, no, that's great. And I do love when I take time to really dig into scripture, to not limit it into the approach, but to learn that, the historical context, to learn some of the literary things that are happening, how things have changed, and then what are some of the theological things that are happening here in my own reflection, trying to bring it to my own life. There's just so much you can do, and those kind of things that can help us fill in and guide us, I think, are just super valuable. So thank you for your work on that. That's a, I'm sure, was kind of a, speaking of Hercules, a Herculean effort to pull all that together. - It was, but it was a lot of fun to take a lot of time, a lot of distilling, and I had to pray with it, which is not something I do in my very cerebral life. So that was, it was meaningful for me. - Well, Mari Leonard Fleckman, thank you so much for taking us a little bit into the Samson story, which I'm gonna go back to the text now and read again and see what I notice this time, and try to take some time with that, and to work in my own life of being okay with some of that ambiguity and not knowing as much as I would like to really just have that laid out for me in a clear way. - Well, thank you very much, Meg. It's been a pleasure to be with you. (upbeat music) - AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada at the United States based in Washington, DC. The show is edited by Marcus Bleach. Our theme music is by Kevin Lasky. The Jesuit Conference Communications Team is Marcus Bleach, Eric Clayton, Meghan Leaps, Becky Sindelar, and me. Connect with the Jesuits online at Jesuits.org, on Instagram at We Are The Jesuits, on X at Jesuit News, and on Facebook at facebook.com/jesuits. Sign up for weekly email reflections at Jesuits.org/weekly. The Jesuit Media Lab offers courses and resources at the intersection of Ignatian spirituality and creativity. If you are a writer, podcaster, filmmaker, visual artist or other creator, check out what we have going on at Jesuitmedialab.org. If you or someone you know might be called to discern a vocation to the Jesuits, connect with a Jesuit vocation promoter at be@jesuits.org. You can drop us an email with questions or comments about the show at media@jesuits.org. And subscribe to AMDG, wherever you get podcasts, including iTunes or Spotify. And as Saint Ignatius of Loyola may or may not have said, go and set the world on fire. (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]