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During high school years I tried desperately to deconstruct and then reconstruct my personality. For starters, I hated being Southern. Television programs like The Beverly Hillbillies and Hee Haw embarrassed me, and I cringed every time I heard President Lyndon Johnson open his mouth: "Mah fella Amuricuns … " Since the rest of the nation in the 1960s seemed to judge Southerners as backward, ignorant, and racist, I wanted to disassociate myself from my region.

Vowel by vowel, I worked on my accent, succeeding so well that people ever since have reacted with surprise when they hear I grew up in the Deep South. I began a campaign to read great books in order to remove provincial blinders. I shunned any behavior that conformed to "appropriate" or "proper" Southern etiquette and sought only the "authentic." I worked to gain control of my emotions so that they were my servant, never my master. I even changed my handwriting, forcing myself to form each letter in a different way than I had before.

By and large the makeover worked, giving me a personality that has fit comfortably in the decades since. I became less vulnerable and more open-minded and flexible—traits not cultivated in my upbringing but useful in my profession as a journalist. It was only years later that I realized the limits to a self-constructed personality. In most ways important to God, I had failed miserably. I was selfish, joyless, loveless, and lacked compassion. With the exception of self-control, I lacked all nine of the fruits of the Spirit listed in Galatians 5. These qualities, I came to realize, cannot be constructed. They must be grown, under the direction of an inner power, the Spirit.

I have since made it a regular practice to pray through the list in Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Do I show love, experience joy, feel peace, exhibit patience? I am humbly aware that any progress in those qualities comes as a result of the Spirit's work. I agree with J. Heinrich Arnold that Christian discipleship "is not a question of our own doing; it is a matter of making room for God so that he can live in us."

Ultimately I came to see that my entire project of reconstructing personality had been misguided. God did not want to work with a wholly different personality; he chose me, as I was.

Mark van Doren, the former literature professor of Thomas Merton (and subject of the movie Quiz Show), visited his ex-student at the Kentucky monastery after a 13-year absence. Van Doren and other friends of Merton still could not comprehend the change that had come over Merton. What power could have transformed him from a New York party animal into a monk who cherished solitude and silence? Van Doren reported, "Of course he looked a little older; but as we sat and talked I could see no important difference in him, and once I interrupted a reminiscence of his by laughing. 'Tom,' I said, 'you haven't changed at all.'

" 'Why would I? Here,' he said, 'our duty is to be more ourselves not less.' It was a searching remark and I stood happily corrected."

The New Testament presents the realm of the Spirit as the culmination of God's work on earth, and as I compare it to what went before, I catch a glimpse why. An Israelite in the Old Testament approached God with fear and trembling, through an elaborate series of rituals under the auspices of professional priests. Jesus' disciples had a much more personal connection. Even so, they seemed to grasp only a portion of what he said, and until the end badly misconstrued his mission. The Holy Spirit, though, "personalizes" God's presence in a way uniquely tailored to my own soul.

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October 25 1999, Vol. 43, No. 12