Initiatives of Change

I remember my mother holding me when I was very small and singing to me in her wavering off-key voice. She couldn’t sing at all but that didn’t stop her! I felt very loved as a child and in later years I wondered how she had learned to be a mother. Her mother died when she was three and she had a difficult, abusive, poverty-stricken childhood. She struggled with the effects of it her entire life—severe depression, lack of self esteem, a conviction she was stupid and ugly, etc. And in spite of all, she gave me a great many gifts, among them love, honesty, spirituality, a great love of reading and a rebellious nature. In spite of her depression and her many fears, she was a strong woman who was a wonderful role model. She struggled to understand herself, and always to grow and change. I remember how she would often be so excited by some powerful insight she had gained. She never stopped learning and growing and working on herself. She was a work in progress. Always.

One of the great gifts I got from her was her honesty. Mother always set great store by honesty, even when it was difficult. She was not honest only when it was easy. She would allow herself to become open and vulnerable in her honesty; she was genuine and would speak her truth always.

Another gift of hers that we all inherited was her love of reading. Books have always been my friends, in good times and bad, and I learned this from her She was always reading; she had a great love of learning and a curiosity about the world. With books you are never lonely. Never bored.
I was not an easy child. I always had a great deal of trouble with authority. I was a rebel from day one, and yet mother always loved and enjoyed me. We really had our differences especially when I became a teenager and my rebellion took a more intellectual turn. I rejected many of her deepest beliefs. We had many battles and there were quite a few years when we didn’t get along well at all. The beginning of the healing came when mother and dad came out to San Francisco to see me. I was 25 years old; it was 1969 and I was taking a lot of LSD. Mother was terrified—not so long ago she had lost a daughter to a brain tumor, and so they came out to convince me to change my life. Of course I fought with her and said, “It’s my life, mother!” After a while she and dad went up on the hill to pray and meditate and seek God’s guidance. When they came down, they said they were letting go, that indeed it was my life - and that they would pray for me. Their letting go seemed miraculous to me then, and still does. How difficult it must have been!

And I truly felt freed. Six months later I decided I was tired of being a hippie, and I stopped doing drugs, and went back to school at UC Berkeley. And the thing that really healed us was their courageous act of letting go.

One of the most important things I got from my mother was the desire to make a difference in the world and the belief that one person can make a difference. I have always wanted to make the world a better place. Somehow my life seems shallow and meaningless if I am not working for social justice. I learned that from her—to have a purpose for my life bigger than my own personal concerns and to care deeply about the world and other people. My mother was a wise and deeply caring woman from whom I have learned much. I’m so grateful for her life... and that she was my mother.

Eulogy given by Zoe Sodja at the funeral of Lela Jackson. Lela died January 24, 2003 at the age of ninety with all her family around her. She first met the ideas of Initiatives of Change in 1938 and spent the rest of her life making them a reality.