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Lea Colvill Takes Church to the Streets and the VW Buses
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Sunday, June 17, 2018
 

STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Lea Colvill has blessed bicycles and bugs, whisking holy water over them with sagebrush branch.

Now, she’s planning to hold a “Blessing of the Buses” on July 29 at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Hailey.

“It’s fun, yes—I enjoy traveling in a VW bus with my family,” she said. “But also I hope it will be a leaping off point for conversation. We have no homeless services in the Wood River Valley, no real place for the homeless to hang out, to get warm. So I’m hoping it will start a conversation about that.”

Mother Lea, as she is known, is the priest at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Hailey. But she doesn’t limit her work to what goes on inside its four walls.

She takes her ministry outside—to Hailey’s Power House  restaurant  where she holds a Pub Ministry twice a month.

Mother Lea takes it to the streets, holding contra dances and picnics outside, inviting passersby to join.

She takes it to the Hailey Public Library where she always has a cheery greeting for patrons as the youth services coordinator.

And she takes it to places like the Sawtooth Botanical Garden where she blessed the bugs at the opening of this year’s Bug Zoo Festival and Earth Day where she blessed bicycles and their riders.

Colvill was confronted with the issue of homelessness last Christmas when she encountered a father, mother and child who were living in their car. They had hoped to make their home in the Wood River Valley but could not find housing so they had settled for eating snacks provided by The Hunger Coalition while using the library’s computer to find housing.

“No Christmas tree. No presents. No warmth. It was awful,” Colvill said. “And it was not reflective of the generosity of the community.”

Covill became the first female pastor of Idaho’s oldest Episcopalian parish In Idaho in March 2017.

She immediately made church members sit up and take notice, parishioner Janet Houts said, as she stomped out a line of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” at the pulpit and presented a brief geography lesson of the Bible in which she compared the topography of Jerusalem to a Bundt cake.

She had come from a church in Indianapolis, attracted to the Sun Valley area by its resemblance to Missoula, Mont., where she grew up.

“It takes determination to live here. But I love the outdoors. And, as a mother of an 11-yar-old daughter,  I love the safety of this place, the bike trails, the bus system.  Indianapolis has 800,000 people versus Hailey with 8,000. My daughter is learning to ski and she loves the physical freedom that comes with living here.”

Colvill’s counterpart—the Rev. Kenneth Brannon of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Sun Valley—blesses sheep during the Trailing of the Sheep Festival every year and pets during the annual Blessing of the Animals. Colvill has found plenty more blessings to spread around, from newborn babies to back-to-school backpacks.

She blessed backpacks before school started, asking that the children study hard and enjoy God’s wisdom as they grow in grace and kindness.

Mother Lea used the words of St. Francis’s Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon while blessing bugs.

“I think the people at the Bug Zoo were humbled. I don’t think anyone had ever offered to bless their bugs before,” she said. “It was interesting, however, as a female cleric to bless a snake because of the enmity God put between snake and woman.”

Mother Lea blessed bicycles at the opening of the bicycle season, trusting that Wood River Valley motorists would exercise caution around bicyclists.

“Bikes are an ecological gift used by most of the planet so that means we have a connection with most people on planet through bikes,” she said. “While working towards being a priest, I spent 12 to 15 hours a day one summer working in a hospital’s emergency department and that makes you very aware of the fragility of life. I blessed children just learning to ride to remind them that their freedom comes with responsibility to be cautious.”

Blessings are not acts of magic, Colvill said.

“We’re acknowledging God’s favor, which is already there. And, as always, I hope it will provoke conversation.”

Colvill started hanging out her Pub Theology shingle asking passersby to “Ask a Priest” at Power House, where her husband Kevin works as a master bike mechanic, in October 2017. She orders the nightly special and takes her seat from 6 to 8ish the first and third Tuesdays of each month.

“Some have coffeehouse ministries,” she said. “This fits in my schedule and it fits the culture of our community. It’s a way to be present in the community, as not everyone goes to church.”

Some diners stop by to tell Colvill a story. Others ask questions.

Are people good or bad? they ask.

“Yes,” she replies. “They’re good and bad. They make good choices and they make bad choices that hurt one another. People are complex—we’re not perfect all the time but the key is being able to start over. And the church helps to clean up the damage we do, as the work of the church is reconciling people to people, reconciling people to God.”

Some ask her about other religious traditions.

“I taught about all the world religions as a school chaplain to middle school students. If I can explain them to middle school students, I can do it with adults,” she said.

She paused.

“Although there was one man who told me that we need to have stronger relations with aliens. I didn’t know what to do with that…”

Covill always has a topic of the night to get conversations started, if need be. The last one was “What is our duty to our neighbor?”

Some ventured that our neighbors are only the people we know. Others insisted our neighbors include everyone on the planet.

“Scripture says our duty is to make sure everybody has enough to be okay,” she said. Then she sighed. “Even after 5,000 year of knowing that, we don’t entirely get it right.”

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