A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY FROM COUTROOM WARRIOR TO PEACEMAKER

Douglas Noll

Seven years ago, I was whitewater rafting with a group of friends in the River of No Return wilderness in central Idaho when I asked myself a simple question: How many people had I actually helped as a trial lawyer? How many clients came out of the litigation process better off than when they went in?

I pondered that all week as I floated through the beautiful Salmon River canyons and muscled my way through its big rapids. At the end, having tried dozens of complex jury trials, bench trials, arbitrations, and administrative hearings and having represented hundreds of clients over 20-plus-years as a very aggressive trial lawyer, I could only name five people. What a sad commentary on what most would consider a highly successful career in law.

This reflection occurred at the same time I was turning from Shou Shu, a particularly violent form of Chinese martial arts in which I had a second-degree black belt, to tai chi. Tai chi was challenging me with two paradoxes. The first was "The softer you are, the stronger you are." The second was "The more vulnerable you are, the more powerful you are." How could this be?

Slowly, as I trained and plumbed this ancient martial art, I began to experience the paradoxes and understand them. Far from passive or weak, they released within me forces that made me immensely more powerful as a martial artist.

Finally I, like many of many my professional colleagues, was fed up with the contentiousness and hostility engendered by the legal system. The battle metaphor had lost its glow of excitement for me.

By happenstance, I heard about a new program at Fresno Pacific University called the Masters Degree in Peacemaking and Conflict Studies. I will never forget going to an orientation and watching Duane Ruth-Heffelbower’s expression when I walked in. It was as if Satan himself had walked through the doors!

Duane, a lawyer with an M.Div., and I had known each other professionally for many years; he was well aware of my reputation. We talked about the Peacemaking and Conflict Studies degree program, and I left the orientation more interested than ever. After discussions with my wife, I decided to enroll.

Little did I realize what changes lay ahead. In this degree program, the first class is a week-long intensive called the Basic Institute in Conflict Management (offered in January and August each year to the general public). I suppose it shows that even hardcore trial lawyers, warrior attorneys, can be redeemed, because after the second day, I was hooked. I went back to my law firm, where I was a senior partner, and told my partners I was changing my business card from "Attorney at Law" to "Peacemaker." This caused great consternation and, some years later, led to my separation from the firm after 22 years. The experience was truly liberating.

As I moved from a contentious, combative lawyer to a peacemaker, another remarkable process began. I was raised in the Episcopal church in an upper-middle-class family where religion was more social than spiritual. In college, I was introduced to Eastern mysticism and learned to meditate.

Nevertheless, while I sensed a spiritual side of me, I was ungrounded. After law school, I dated a woman from a more conservative Christian faith tradition and followed her through Bible Study Fellowship for a few years. I tended to spook the others in the class with my metaphysical interpretations of the Scriptures. After that relationship, my spiritual life languished except for brief stint in a Lutheran church, where I married my wife.

In my graduate peacemaking studies, my mentors, all Mennonites, did not push their faith on me. I clearly saw, however, that their principal motivation for their work came from their faith. While I respected them immensely, the deeper nature of peacemaking had yet to dawn on me.

As I began my peacemaker practice, I awoke to the idea that the work was both pragmatic and spiritual. I experienced transformation after transformation in the conflicts I worked on. The human capacity for compassion, forgiveness, and tolerance astounded me time and again, until I realized that this is the way people are when given a chance. I saw the transcendent good in all people, which led me to a deeply spiritual life of meditation, work, healing, and faith.

Today I have a thriving professional peacemaking practice working with complex, difficult disputes in which relationships are at issue and litigation is often not a good option. More importantly, I have helped far more people resolve their conflicts peacefully in the past five years, than I had helped as a trial lawyer in the previous 22 years.

—Douglas E. Noll, Fresno, California, is a graduate of the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law (J.D. 1977) and Fresno Pacific University (M.A., Peacemaking and Conflict Studies, 2001). The author of Peacemaking: Practicing at the Intersection of Law and Conflict (Cascadia, 2003), he is admitted to practice in California, the U.S. Supreme Court, and various federal appellate and district courts. Noll now limits his practice to peacemaking and mediation. He lives with his wife Jan in the foothills of the central Sierra Nevada outside of Fresno.