It’s raining heavily outside right now, and yet it sounds nothing like it did in the days before I wrote, from the comfort of our well-worn couch, this piece on recovering from trauma that I shared on Facebook. It was all I had to offer as I convalesced from surgery as my friends and neighbors … Continue reading Of Hurricane Harvey and a Hydrocodone Haze: A Short Reflection One Year Later →

Based on Luke 17:5-10 within the context of 1-4, delivered on World Communion Sunday, 2016, shared now in order to give context to some of the verses being thrown around this week by the AG. Luke 17:5-10: The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” The Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of … Continue reading Sermon: “Faith Enough to Forgive” →

Reflections after responding to the Santa Fe shootings: As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk would have predicted, it broke through when I started dancing, if you can call the thing I was doing (something that increasingly began looking and feeling like some angry Elaine Benes gyration) dancing. “Dancing,” the thing I was doing, began the weekend … Continue reading Guns in My Area →

I checked my phone before going to bed last night and I saw I’d missed a group text from a colleague earlier in the evening. She told us she’d just heard how a favorite psychiatrist on our referral list had died by suicide, and rather dramatically at that. I was dumbstruck. I stared at the … Continue reading “The Doctor Won’t See You Now…” →

[Gen 9:8-17] You promised not to wipe out ALL flesh ever again, O God. You hung up your bow, your capacity to just start over in an instant. Now and then, you remind yourself of this promise with an all-inclusive arc of color in the sky. You hope this reminds us, too. But we are … Continue reading On remembering not the reminder but what is to be remembered… →

[Given at First Reformed Church, Spring Lake, MI, January 12, 2018] Good morning. My name is Holly Teitsma. I am here with and representing my step-son Austin Teitsma, grandson to Dena, and my husband, Jack Teitsma, Dena’s son. Dena, therefore, was my mother-in-law. She was my first and only mother-in-law, even though I was not … Continue reading Eulogy for a Syrophoenician Woman →

In the movie Six Degrees of Separation, Stockard Channing’s character, Louise “Ouisa” Kittredge, the sophisticated spouse to Flan, a wealthy international art dealer played by Donald Sutherland, blithely narrates for him as he rotates a two-sided Kandinsky on a vertical axis: “Chaos…Control. Chaos…Control…” Around and around he shows the double canvas, one side painted wildly … Continue reading When in Need of Wisdom →