Testimony of Healing October 15, 2012 Issue

Pain and immobility dissolved by forgiveness

Paul Moreau

I was a police officer for 30 years until I retired in 2006. The culture of my department in the early years of my career was that humor was of the “anything goes” variety; it was never malicious, just considered good-natured.

One day in 1984, before the shift started, several of us were engaging in this bantering, when I dropped a particularly biting zinger on one of the guys, which included racial language, in response to an equally off-color remark he had just made. Much to my surprise, he became incensed and actually acted as if he wanted to fight me.

When the briefing was over, I immediately went to this officer—whom I’ll call Officer A—to make things right with him as I certainly didn’t want any hard feelings between us. I considered him to be a good friend as we played racquetball together regularly after work. He said he knew, after he had calmed down, that I wasn’t being malicious, that I wasn’t a racist, but that I just “didn’t know what it was like” (meaning, what it was like to be black). I told him I agreed, I didn’t know what it was like, and that I was sorry I had offended him. I promised I would never tease him like that again. He accepted my apology, and a few days later gave me a new pair of racquetball shoes to show he was sorry that he’d become so angry at me. We continued to be friends.

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