All Saints’, Dorval
October 5, 2025
The sign for Clementine’s Peace Rug.
I want to tell you a story. It comes from my friend and colleague Andrea Roske-Metcalfe, a brilliant Lutheran pastor, who wrote it three and a half years ago, right after the invasion of Ukraine, as part of her commentary about a teacher strike in the Twin Cities, where she lives.
***
“Where should the peace rugs go, Mom?” Clementine, my eight-year-old, asked me. “They have to be in a place where there’s plenty of room and it’s easy to get to them.”
Peace rugs. I vaguely remembered her classroom teacher mentioning this during parent-teacher conferences. When two kids in their 2nd grade class get into a disagreement, or someone has their feelings hurt, they give the peace pass to the classmate with whom they are in conflict, as an invitation to sit together on the rug and go through these steps:
Arrive calm.
Explain what happened without blaming.
When that happened, I felt _____________________.
In the future, please _____________________.
To feel better, I need ______________________.
Agree on the solution.
Entirely of her own initiative, Clementine made peace rugs for our family, complete with a peace pass and a reminder of the statements for conversation.
I thought that was nice. I thought it was cute. I snapped a pic to send to her teacher with words of gratitude. I meant them, don’t get me wrong, but also dinner was hot and I was hungry and so I called everyone to the table and we ate and then we went about our evening.
And I kind of forgot about the whole thing, to be honest.
But tonight? Tonight, after dinner, when my husband was out and I was doing bedtime alone with the girls, I was just done. I needed my kids to be in bed. They were supposed to be on their way there when I could hear them getting into some little spat over which books were whose. I was over it. I went upstairs to fold clothes in the hopes they could work it out on their own.
I came back downstairs a few minutes later expecting to find them still arguing, or each in her own room with a sour attitude, but instead I found them on the living room rug, sitting criss-cross-applesauce and facing each other.
“What are you girls doing?” I asked. I was kind of exasperated about it. “You’re supposed to be in bed!”
“Um, we’re using the peace pass,” Clem said. Her tone was basically, “Duh, Mom.”
I let them be. After just a few more minutes they were laughing together, and then they headed into their bedrooms.
“Wait, that’s it?” I asked. “You’re all done arguing?”
They were.
“And I didn’t have to get involved? And you’re not all crabby about it??”
They were not.
It was like magic. I’ve been parenting for nearly 12 years. I feel like I leveled up tonight but I didn’t have a darn thing to do with it. This was entirely Clementine’s teacher, modeling conflict management in a classroom full of 7- and 8-year-old children.
These literal magicians teach our children how to be people – how to feel their feelings and manage their conflicts and approach problems with curiosity. …
The world is on fire. In some ways, it always has been, but tonight actual nuclear power plants are burning because grown leaders who are drunk on power never had an elementary school teacher take the time to sit them down and teach them how to work through their feelings.
***
Jesus said, “If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive.” The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” The Lord replied, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”
The sharp-eyed among you have noticed that once again I have extended the day’s reading slightly, because the six verses assigned for today make no sense without the four verses that precede them. When the disciples say, “Increase our faith!” the request doesn’t come out of nowhere; it’s specifically in response to the challenging teaching about forgiveness. And the rest of the passage is Jesus hammering his point home.
The disciples want to be able to feel different – to have more faith – before they have to do the hard work of forgiving others. But they have it exactly backwards. It’s not the nice feelings that enable forgiveness. It’s the practice of forgiveness that brings faith and consolation.
This would all be so, so much clearer if we had all been taught to use the peace rug in second grade.
Arrive calm.
Explain what happened without blaming.
When that happened, I felt _____________________.
In the future, please _____________________.
To feel better, I need ______________________.
Agree on the solution.
“If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive.”
Rebuke and repentance are essential to forgiveness. Rebuke – agreeing on what happened and its impact – and repentance – the injured party receiving honest understanding and the promise of genuine follow-through to do better. The reason forgiveness has a bad name in some circles is because so often it has been demanded from those who have been harmed, while those who have perpetrated the harm have been allowed to get away with, at best, an “I’m sorry you feel that way” non-apology before they go right back to behaving the exact same way that did the damage in the first place.
Letting go of bitterness, even in the absence of repentance, can be psychologically necessary for the victims of harm to be able to move on with their lives. But genuine repair, the kind that really excavates the corrosive wounds of the past and allows them to heal, rather than plastering them over while they continue to fester, requires those who have wronged others to admit it, and make amends, and do better.
This is really, really hard. But it isn’t impossible. It isn’t something for which you need a special infusion of magical faith. You just need to do it.
And that’s the thing about Jesus’ weird remarks about uprooting the mulberry tree and planting it in the sea. Presumably, with enough time and effort, this task is something that could be done by ordinary unaided humans. They’d have to dig up the tree, and wrap the roots, and load it on a wagon, and drive the wagon down the road to the shore, and hoist the tree out and drop it into the water. It would be a great deal of work for absolutely no useful purpose, but it’s doable. It’s not like Jesus is promising them that if they wish hard enough, they can turn themselves into an elephant or dig a hole to China. This is an achievable task. They just have to do it.
And if they do it enough times, then they will become the kind of people who know how to forgive and be forgiven, and the whole thing will be much less scary. Like a couple of second-graders who were taught how to solve problems when they’re mad at each other, just as a matter of course, as part of the ordinary work of being human, before they get old enough that it becomes a huge, fraught, embarrassing thing.
This weekend, our diocese consecrates and installs a new bishop. The process of getting to this point was painful. It would have been a great deal less so if we were accustomed, as a church, to actually practicing what we preach when it comes to forgiveness. If we had been accustomed to repentance and repair, rather than sweeping things under the rug. If we had been taught, like seven-year-olds in the Twin Cities, how to grab the Peace Pass and not only tell our classmate how they made us feel, but really listen when they tell us how we make them feel.
This isn’t easy. But it’s also not complicated. Twelve step groups have been showing us how to do it for almost a century. Uprooting a mulberry tree and planting it in the sea isn’t impossible, or even particularly logistically complex; it’s just hard.
The best time to have learned how to sit across from each other on the peace rugs and engage in reconciliation would have been when we were in elementary school, but the second best time is now.
And I use the word “reconciliation” advisedly. This past Tuesday was the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. We all wore our orange shirts, but are we prepared to follow through on what it means to be truly committed to a process of reconciliation that is open-ended, that is a way of life, that involves repenting and forgiving not just once, but over and over and over?
It’s the hardest thing imaginable – except for how hard it is, right now, to live with the unhealed wounds, the unspoken truths, the unmended relationships.
May we quit making excuses and just get on with the job to be done. May there be repentance, restoration, repair, and reconciliation, in our time.
Amen.
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