Meet Barbara Erakko Taylor
On weaving prayer into her life.
(Barbara Erakko Taylor designed an information system for the White House Executive Office and several Federal and Fortune 500 companies before gradually embracing a solitary lifestyle of silence and contemplation. She lives and writes in Missouri. This interview took place in 2007.)
Kristen: When you look back over your spiritual journey, what event was most important to you?
Barbara: Oh, my initial conversion experience is the most important part! I was raised by an atheist father, with a Lutheran mother who didn’t go to church either, to keep dad happy. I did get confirmed one Sunday; but the next Sunday, I got up and got ready for church and everybody was sleeping. That was that. I became comfortable as a vague agnostic.
Later, when my girls were young, I knew a retired Methodist minister dying of a lung disease. So, I was walking, thinking about him, wondering how long he would linger, and I heard this voice say, “February 20th.” This was in October, but I went in and wrote it down.
And then a friend of mine asked me to fly to Boston to be a consultant while she had back surgery on February 21st. I didn’t want to fly and then wondered why I was fearful – strange why I would be that way. I was really anxious and unnerved.
Well, he did die on the 20th. I was hysterical. I consulted my spiritual director at the time, because I was in so much pain about this. And she said, “Well, what does your prayer say?” and my prayer said, “Trust your prayer.” But I believed I was going to die. I said to God, “ I guess you want my life for something.” And I flew to Boston, and it was fine. But, when I got to the hotel, there was a message from my friend, whose brother had died that day in a mid-air collision.
And that was my conversion experience. I believed that there was a God somewhere somehow trying to touch me, and that all these intuitions were real and I could have faith in him. It was not an intellectual thing, but a conversion of the heart.
Kristen: Wow! That’s quite a story!
Barbara: I really think as a child, I had a strong spiritual path.
Kristen: You were a wife and mother, and discovered meditation then.
Barbara: Yes. (pause) I was more of a spirit mother than an earth mother. The earth moms, their feet are fully grounded-- they get the meals on the table. The spirit mom can look into that inner essence of the person. I was that kind of mom. My meditation grew and grew in those years.
Kristen: You’ve written two books about silence and solitude. I wasn’t sure you would talk in the interview. (laughs)
Barbara: (laughs) Really, I think that stage of my life was a time and place to heal and grow after my marriage ended. I needed a secure nest. The healing happened in the silence and the prayer. But the artistic side of me found the house too confining. The little bird couldn’t spread his wings.
Kristen: So, you are not in solitude any longer?
Barbara: No, not in that way. I eventually felt called out of the deliberate solitary life and more to service. I went on a Vision quest in Colorado. You had to fast for three days and four nights alone with your plastic tarp and a sleeping bag. It was a real shifting of my consciousness. At the end, we all shared our stories, and the medicine names that we discerned. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to try to weave their sacred names into an altar cloth?” So I tried it when I got home.
Kristen: And that’s how the prayer shawl ministry started for you?
Barbara: Right. It was a natural leap from there to pray into the weavings. At my first show, a woman walked right into my booth and said, “This is mine!” So, I told her to look at the prayer card to see what I had been praying during the weaving and she burst into tears. “When I was in intensive care recently, your prayer here is the one that I was saying!”
Kristen: What does the prayer shawl do for the wearer?
Barbara: It’s like a portable tabernacle to wrap yourself in, to create sacred space. Have you ever heard the story about Susanna Wesley, mother of John Wesley? [ed. note: founder of the Methodist church.] When the kids overwhelmed her, she would throw her skirt over her head to escape. You know— we all need sacred time and space.
Kristen: When you work on commission, what do you pray into the weaving?
Barbara: I ask the person, “At this point in your sacred journey, what do you want to wrap yourself in? What color is this for you? (Let it tell you!) and What prayer do you want? And the answers to those questions just get me started. It’s amazing what happens in the weaving.
A neighbor asked me to create one for his wife, and I had a lot of tangled threads when I worked on it. So, I mentioned to the wife when I gave it to her that I had had to do lots of untangling as I wove. She burst into tears and told me later that she cried for days. It turned out that she had been all tangled up about leaving her husband, but that now they had some deep conversations and she would stay. That husband was so intuitive and he sensed the right thing to do.
