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Longtime CharityFocus friend, James O’dea, recently came out with his first book — Creative Stress!  It opens with a remarkable story that might be familiar to some of us …

First, her words: "On 17th August 1973, whilst walking to work with a colleague, who was a member of the reserve police force, gunmen opened fire. We were going into our building of work, we were civil servants.

I was shot with a sub-machine gun, was taken to hospital, 14 miles away, where I had emergency surgery. The bullet had entered through the top of my left arm, broke ribs, split my lung and lodged between my heart and main artery. Surgery lasted over 6 hours and I had to have 20 pints of blood. I was in Intensive Care Unit where my consultant told my family ‘that he left me comfortable to die’. I spent seven weeks in hospital, then discharged and was told to get on with my life."

You can imagine trying to pick up your life with a bullet literally lodged next to your heart. The sense of shock, trauma, grief and outrage must have been extremely intense. Nonetheless Frances decided to face all those conflicting emotions and with some trepidation she decided to go to a retreat with Towards Understanding and Healing. One of the women who was heading this work, who also became a friend and mentor to Frances, was Maureen Hetherington — one of the great visionary activists for peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Maureen, who is a friend and colleague, was pregnant when her husband Douggie was brutally shot on his first day of work for the Ulster Constabulary. Douggie had to have his arm amputated as a result.

It was not easy for Frances but she opened herself to healing, knowing that the opening would not only stir her wounds but provide fresh challenges. This exemplifies the handshake with stress. Nowadays, Frances is engaged in continued efforts to promote dialogue between Protestants and Catholics. She transformed a catastrophically negative experience — a bullet which entered her body with the velocity of hatred — and instead of living a quiet life in private peace and security, she chooses to live in the challenging fires of sectarian peacemaking. For her, the answer to her stress has been to nurture a more meaningful life…to summon up courage, to attempt to change the course of history and to face down oppression and intolerance. When we were together in London Derry a while back, I was stunned by her quiet demeanour and humility. There with the evidence of another’s fierce aggression and hatred lodged next to her heart, she still chooses to find her own highest self. Without such creativity and commitment — without such embodied virtue — where do you suppose humanity would be headed?

Let’s tell each other the stories of those who become our greatest teachers and templates of higher consciousness — in their stories you will find that they not only shake the hand of stress, they dance with it.

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