Sometimes the best stories come to you when you least expect it.At least that’s the way it happened to me.Ever since I left upstate New York a little more than two years ago, I’ve been living in a small town in the Midwest where the only place for a writer to sit and write and have a good cup of coffee is the local grocery store. The place has none of the ambience of a coffee house. No warm and complementary colors on the wall. No wood furniture. No art on the walls. No jazz or alternative music. It has all the characteristics of a junior high school cafeteria without the food fights.But it’s all I got.I’ve become somewhat of a fixture here. People even joke that there should be a placard fixed on the wall by the booth where I always sit: “Writer at Work.” I often refer to it as my office. The other patrons—almost entirely retired farmers—don’t know what to make of me, sitting in the same booth every morning, seven days a week, writing and bobbing my head and swaying rhythmically to whatever music I’m listening to on my blue Skull Candy headphones, clad in a flamboyant shirt and sporting an English-style cap. To them, I must appear altogether too happy for someone living in the Bible-Belt. I get a lot of looks followed by low whispers and the occasional finger-pointing. Some people smile weakly as they pass me in a way that seems to say, “Why don’t you get a real job?”But, for the most part, people are friendly enough.I had been working on the finishing touches of a novel that is influenced by Thomas Merton, widely considered one of the most influential thinkers, philosophers, writers, Christian mystics, and social activists of the twentieth century. His mega-selling The Seven Story Mountain is often compared to St. Augustine’s Confessions as a coming-to-faith autobiography. In all, he published sixty-five books. During his lifetime Merton communicated with many of the world’s greatest writers, artists, and social rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr. and the Buddhist peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. He was one of the most vocal critics of the Vietnam War. James Laughlin published Merton’s first book of poetry at New Directions, and shortly thereafter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was then founding City Lights, published Merton’s poems in a proto-Beat anthology with the likes of Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg. In his speech to Congress on September 24, 2015, Pope Francis mentioned Thomas Merton numerous times, praising him as one of the greatest Americans, alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, and Abraham Lincoln. For a week afterward, Thomas Merton became one of the most searched topics on the internet as millions of people wanted to learn who this guy was. The Thomas Merton Center in Louisville and the Thomas Merton Center for Social Justice in Pittsburgh were inundated with calls and media interviews.One day last spring, while I was working on the book in the cafeteria, a fellow brave enough came over and asked me what I was working on. I replied that it was a novel influenced by Thomas Merton, certain that a local would have no idea who Merton was.Instead, his answer floored me.“Oh, I know all about Merton. A little old lady I used to work with used to be good friends with him, and she has these trunks full of his personal belongings from the Gethsemani monastery,” he said quite matter-of-factly.My jaw dropped.“Really?” was all I could muster in reply.“Yep. She was a nun back then. I think she lived at the convent a few miles away from where Merton was. That’s how they became friends.”“Do you remember her name?” I asked eagerly.“Helen Marie [not her full name]. We worked at the same place back then.”“And she told you she had these trunks . . . of stuff?” I asked.“Yep.”“Do you think she was telling the truth?”“Nuns don’t lie. Besides, I’ve seen them . . . about twenty, twenty-five years ago.”I didn’t know what to say. My brain was racing, red-lining with a million questions.“How did she come to have them? Do you think she’s still alive? Where does she live? Do you think she still has them?”Several conversations with this intriguing fellow ensued during the following weeks, and I couldn’t let it go. Each time I saw him I asked about the trunks full of Mertonalia and the little old nun. Finally, after some phone calls, he told me that she was still alive and living in Kansas City, a three-hour drive southwest of where I was living. We called and made an appointment to visit her on June 30th. The day came and we drove down to see her in his little truck. I was as excited as I could possibly be. Did she still have the trunks? What was in them? Would she show them to us? If she did, what then? With my training as an anthropologist, archaeologist, oral historian, writer, and as a post-doctoral student of religion at Harvard, I knew the value of such a discovery. My mouth was dry with anticipation. At the same time, I tried to prepare myself in the event that it was all just a big snipe hunt.We arrived on time and Helen Marie greeted us at the door. I was at once impressed by her openness, by her sense of jubilation, and by her kindness. She was in her mid-eighties, lean and fit for her age, and she stood only a little over five feet tall. She kindly invited us into her living room, which was otherworldly, overflowing with angels of every variation: porcelain doll angels, stuffed animal angels, pictures on the walls of angels, crystal angels. The assortment even included a table lamp shaped like an angel. An enormous portrait of Jesus hung above the fireplace, which looked as if it hadn’t been used in years.For almost two hours, Helen Marie told us about her friendship with Father Louis, as Merton was known during his twenty-seven years as a monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani (1941–1968), just south of Bardstown, Kentucky. As she spoke, I furiously scribbled notes on a yellow legal notepad. Her story went something like this: In 1966, after fifteen years as a nun in a convent in Brooklyn, she wanted to go meet Merton. She, and many of the other nuns, had been reading Merton’s books, and Helen Marie felt a burning desire to learn from him. She had been having doubts about her life in the convent. She wanted a spiritual teacher to help guide her. Other nuns told her that someone as famous as Thomas Merton wouldn’t make time for someone like her, an uneducated scullery maid who had spent her vocation washing and scouring dishes in the convent kitchen.Apparently, they didn’t know Sister Mary Pius, as she was called back then.She was a plucky and feisty force to reckon with. She told the abbot, Father Campbell, of her desire to meet Merton, certain that he would try to dissuade her as did her fellow sisters. To her amazement and relief, the abbot encouraged her to go, with certain provisos, namely, that she not write or call the Abbey of Gethsemani to arrange a visit. Instead, he urged her just to go. Just show up on their doorsteps. It would be more difficult for them to turn away a nun who had traveled half way across America. He reached into his own wallet and gave her the money for round-trip Greyhound bus tickets. On January 13, 1966, after a long and eventful journey that began at Manhattan’s Port Authority Building, Helen Marie showed up at Gethsemani’s gate during the biggest snow storm in years. The hour was already late. She had no means by which to go back to Bardstown or Louisville at such an hour. So the abbot did the only decent thing he could do under the circumstance—he put her up for the night in their guest house outside the walled monastery.For two days, Helen Marie waited in the guest house for Merton to come see her. But she was told he was at his hermitage up in the hills, and that, because of the snow, he wasn’t going to see her. But the little nun that could was determined. She wasn’t going home without meeting Thomas Merton.And so she waited.Finally, Merton showed up. He had heard how far she had come to meet him. He told her that he admired her tenacity. They sat and talked in the guest house for a couple hours, and it was decided that she would return to the nunnery in Brooklyn and that he, Thomas Merton, the most famous monk in the world, would work with her abbot back home to get her reassigned to be closer to Gethsemani so that he could become her spiritual teacher and adviser.In no time at all, Sister Mary Pius found herself assigned to the Sisters of Loretto, a convent for the care of aging and infirm retired nuns. She was also granted dispensation from the convent back in Brooklyn, a formal sabbatical, of sorts. She was further instructed that she could not wear her habit during this period, though she was required to uphold all other vows and religious observations. Only a dozen miles away from the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Sisters of Loretto was a place where nuns came to die and to be buried with other sisters in the beautiful cemetery up on the hill.For the next two years Helen Marie worked at the mother-house caring for elderly nuns. Every Sunday she and several other nuns took a bus for the thirteen-mile ride to Gethsemani to attend Mass. At Gethsemani, Helen Marie met a monk by the name of Brother Irenaeus (his worldly name being Robert, “Bobby” to friends). Br. Irenaeus had already lived a busy life at the monastery for fifteen years. He ran the tailor shop. As a kind of quartermaster of clothing, his duties required making religious habits and issuing clothes to fellow monks as needed. His “shop” was surrounded by shelves laden with shoes and socks, denim shirts and blue jeans, and habits and oblates of all sizes. He also stored the monks’ worldly clothes and their trunks bearing their belongings with which they arrived at the gate of Gethsemani. With respect specifically to Merton, Br. Irenaeus was also responsible for storing the famous monk’s suits, needed for those occasions when he left Gethsemani to travel. In addition he also repaired clothing damaged during the course of manual labor around the monastery, which was herculean. Physical labor, contemplation, the rigorous observance of ritual, chant, and silence comprise the hallmarks of Trappist monks.Like many young men who had been in WWII, Br. Irenaeus sought a place of quiet refuge where he could escape the recurring horrors and scars of combat and search for meaning and, perhaps even, forgiveness (Merton writes about this in The Seven Storey Mountain). Robert had been a tail gunner in the Army Air Corps. His B-17 was shot down over Germany on his way back from his twenty-fifth and last mission. He managed to parachute out safely, but he was captured by the Germans and spent the last eight months of the war in a German POW camp, from which he escaped twice, only to be recaptured and returned.After Mass, Thomas Merton (Fr. Louis), Helen Marie, and Br. Irenaeus would go for “Sunday drives” around the countryside in the monastery’s doorless, four-wheel-drive Ford Bronco. Br. Irenaeus always did the driving, Helen Marie sitting by the passenger side door, with Merton in the middle. Br. Irenaeus came along as a chaperone as required by the abbots of both the monastery and the nunnery. Although Helen Marie hitched a ride to Mass with other nuns, she alone stayed at Gethsemani for much of the rest of the afternoon and, therefore, had to frequently walk home back to Loretto. Did I mention that this little woman was determined? Over all those Sundays, a friendship was forged among the three.But how did Helen Marie end up with the worldly possessions of Thomas Merton?On December 11, 1968, Father Flavian, the abbot of Gethsemani, received word that Thomas Merton had died under somewhat mysterious circumstances the day before in a small community near Bangkok, Thailand. He had been attending an interfaith conference where he met and counseled with the Dalai Lama, among other religious figures. Father Flavian, immediately worrying that souvenir and relic hunters would descend on the monastery in droves, directed Br. Irenaeus to collect all of Merton’s personal possessions, especially his clothes, and to get rid of them discreetly. The abbot himself didn’t want to know what he did with them.So instructed by the abbot, Br. Irenaeus took two empty trunks from the storage room, drove up to Merton’s hermitage in the hills, and filled them with his dead friend’s belongings, many of them now iconic. Among the items included were Merton’s personal psalter—a heavy, over-sized, leather-bound and metal-clasped book published in France in 1888 by the Trappists (Gethsemani is a Trappist monastery). Also included were his white habits, his black monk’s cowl, his now-iconic denim jacket seen on so many book covers, work clothes, sleeping clothes, blankets, his ceremonial flagellation whip, the colorful hood he received with an honorary doctoral degree, and other objects. Even the pillows from Merton’s narrow bed were placed into the trunks. Inside the pockets of one pair of denim jeans were two used and wadded up handkerchiefs (it is known that Merton was having severe allergies that summer and fall). Perhaps most sacred of all was Merton’s rosary, which he had given to Helen Marie a few days before he left on his fateful trip. They were standing below the statue of Joseph atop the grassy hill overlooking Gethsemani and the surrounding countryside.“I don’t think I’m coming back alive,” he said, as he placed it into her open palm and gently pushed her fingers closed around it.“I’ll hold onto it until you come home,” she replied, concerned by his comment.After almost a half century, she was still safeguarding it for him.Days later, when Merton’s body was returned via military flight and eventually to Gethsemani, Br. Irenaeus added to the trunks some of the clothing attending his body, including the new white habit Merton wore in the iconic photo of him posing with the Dalai Lama, and some suit ties he had bought and worn while in Bangkok.With their friend gone, there was nothing to keep Helen Marie and Br. Irenaeus at Gethsemani. For some time preceding Merton’s last journey, the couple had sought Merton’s counsel about their growing love and the possibility of marriage. Merton had advised them to follow their hearts and get married, saying that they could still find ways to serve God and others as laypeople. Within days of Merton’s burial, Brother Irenaeus loaded up the heavy trunks, and went to collect Helen Marie. They moved to Louisville, only a forty minute drive north, marrying shortly thereafter. The monks from Gethsemani baked their wedding cake. A few years later, they moved to Kansas City where they both worked for almost a quarter century in the prayer room at Unity Village, a popular interreligious education campus and retreat. It was there in the mid-1990s that they worked with the gentleman who first set me on the trail of this amazing story.After listening to the history of her friendship with Thomas Merton in her curious living room of angels, I asked Helen Marie if she still had the materials. In reply, she changed the subject. But I had already learned a lesson from this determined little woman. Although respectful, I was . . . tenacious.“You know,” I’d say every five minutes, “if you have them stored in the basement or in the attic or in the garage or buried under boxes, I could move them for you.”Eventually she took us downstairs to her garage and pointed out the trunks, which were buried under twenty or more boxes. We had to dig them out. I was absolutely amazed at the treasure trove when we at last opened the trunks. I recognized many of the objects from photographs of Merton. Seeing my reverence and enthusiasm and commitment to finding the proper homes for the items, Helen Marie told me to take them.Over numerous subsequent visits and interviews, Helen Marie brought out more materials to give to me, including photo albums full of letters and notes and photos that no one had ever seen before, photos of the inside of Merton’s hermitage around the time of his death. My favorite is a photograph taken by Helen Marie of Merton with a Budweiser at one of their picnics (monks invented beer). There was also a rather prescient poem that Merton had written the day before he died in Thailand. Br. Irenaeus found it inside a pocket when Merton’s body was returned.Helen Marie told me that I wasn’t the first writer to have approached her about the story. She told me that back in the mid-1980s, another writer approached her, having heard a rumor that she had been friends with Merton. It turned out to be none other than Irving Stone, author of such great works as The Agony and the Ecstasy, the story of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Van Gogh, still a classic biography of Van Gogh’s life and death (though we have learned new facts about the circumstances of Van Gogh’s death since Stone wrote his book). She turned him down flat. When I asked why, she replied, “Everyone in the story was still alive back then. Now, I’m the only one left.”For half a century, Robert and Helen Marie safeguarded the possessions of their departed friend, but over the decades, numerous unscrupulous people, many friends and family, preyed upon Helen Marie’s generosity and naïveté (a result of having been a nun for so long). For example, her boss when she worked briefly as a waitress at a restaurant in Louisville in 1970 hounded her to give him something. Fearful of losing her job, she surrendered and gave him the doctoral hood. Robert’s own sister begged and pleaded for one of the long white, hooded Trappist monk habits and numerous other objects. She eventually donated the habit to the Thomas Merton Center for Social Justice in her hometown of Pittsburgh and the other items to the Thomas Merton Center in Louisville. Helen Marie tells me there were many objects so pilfered from the trunks over the decades. Some have never been seen again.She regrets having let even one item slip away from her.In 2004, Robert had a debilitating stroke; a blood clot left him completely paralyzed on the left side of his body and institutionalized. Helen Marie retired from Unity Village so that she could spend every available minute of every day at his side until the staff asked her to leave at the end of visiting hours. Robert died five years later in August of 2009. Alone, and devastated, for years Helen Marie prayed for an answer as to what she should do with the belongings of Thomas Merton.Then one bright and sunny day in the summer of 2015, I arrived at her doorstep, an answer to her prayers, or so she tells me every time we talk. More than that, Helen Marie insists that she believes that Thomas Merton himself guided me to her. She believes he hand-picked me out of every living soul to be the one to whom she would finally surrender the collection of his possessions, knowing that I would do the right thing by them, and by him, and would find the right homes for them. For Helen Marie, It was Merton who led me to northeast Missouri and to that grocery store cafeteria booth so that I could meet and talk to the gentleman that fateful day. I have to say that such a notion filled me with some trepidation. What a troubling responsibility. I have actually wept struggling to comprehend my role in all this. Helen Marie wanted the items to be made freely available to the world in institutions and museums, so that the millions of people who have been touched by Merton’s writings and by his example can come closer to the man who was the most famous monk in the world. The transfer has been bittersweet for Helen Marie. While happy to be free of the burden, she nonetheless found it painful to let go of something that had been so much a part of her life for half a century.Obliged with a sense of purpose, I spent the summer on a pilgrimage, of sorts. I rode my motorcycle halfway across America to meet with institutions such as the Thomas Merton Center in Louisville, Kentucky. It was there at Bellarmine University that Merton himself wanted his archives to go. I drove down past Bardstown to visit the Abbey of Gethsemani and to spend some time talking to Merton at his graveside. I apologized for my failings; I thanked him for the privilege; and I pledged to do my very best to find the right places to donate his belongings.After that I drove the backroads through a torrential rainstorm to the Sisters of Loretto, where Sister Helen Marie had lived and worked those two years. I took lots of photos of the trip, which I later shared with Helen Marie. She marveled at the changes rendered by fifty years. Trees that had been little more than shrub height lined the main boulevard, concealing the three-story red brick buildings. The cemetery for nuns had expanded considerably. For me the visit to the monastery and the convent was an intense emotional experience, after which I took a brief detour to the Maker’s Mark whisky distillery just down the road.But the story doesn’t entirely end there. There are side-stories of intrigue and subterfuge. I was cautioned not to make my “discovery” public for fear that some overzealous Merton collectors might break into my home to steal the relics, thereby endangering my family. Toward the end of summer, Helen Marie was diagnosed with stage-four lymphoma, for which she has been receiving treatment, including chemotherapy. Her hair has fallen out, and she feels tired most of the time, yet she remains, as always, cheerful and certain that whatever happens to her is God’s will. A nun to the end. But the prognosis is good. She seems to be responding well to her treatments. She plans to accompany me and my family to Louisville in late January to attend the unveiling of a Merton exhibit at the Frasier Museumt hat includes some of the objects from the two trunks. I can see why Thomas Merton befriended Helen Marie. She is so joyful and kind, simple and humble, and her heart is so full of love for others, more so than anyone I have ever met. While other friends wrote tell-all books about Merton after his death, Helen Marie has kept their conversations confidential almost unto her death bed. But after half a century, she feels there are some things that need to be told, and so she has been telling them to me.This fall, after Pope Francis told the world of his admiration for Merton in his September 24 address to Congress, I wrote to the Pope, offering to donate at least one of the iconic artifacts to the Vatican, one that embodies the simplicity and humbleness of Merton’s life. After all, Thomas Merton was a Roman Catholic priest beloved by more than one Pope (Pope John XXII gave Merton a gold-embroidered liturgical stole, and Pope Paul VI gave him a bronze crucifix, saying that Merton was among his favorite Christian writers in history).Now that the artifacts have found homes, or are earmarked to go to specific appropriate institutions, I was able to go public with the story. I did an interview on National Public Radio. An hour in the studio was condensed down to six minutes on air. Helen Marie and Paul Pearson, the director of the Thomas Merton Center in Louisville participated in the interview. This article is the first written account of the story.This is a story that was meant to be.The coincidences and confluences are plenteous: 2015 is the centennial celebration of Merton’s birth. At the outset of the story he had been gone for almost half a century. I, who was a boy when he died in 1968, am now the same age as he was at the time of his death. More than that, Merton spent a week in Eagle River, Alaska during his fateful 1968 journey to Thailand. I’m from Eagle River (I didn’t know about the connection beforehand). We both studied at Cambridge (Merton at Clare College; me at Caius College). Br. Irenaeus had already passed away, and in her mid-eighties, Helen Marie is getting near her end as well. She was certain the trunks would have been discarded as junk by family members tasked with emptying her house to prepare it for sale in the event of her passing. Her disease was diagnosed shortly after giving me the Merton collection. The fact that I was living only three hours away and finishing a book about Christian relics influenced by Merton is spooky. The fact that I bumped into someone in the cafeteria who knew something important about this story is spookier. It is not lost on me that this was a story destined to unfold precisely when it did. I will forever be grateful that I was the right person at the right place at the right time.People often ask me what I have learned from the experience. My answer is swift. I have come to realize how much I am the product of American consumerism and capitalism and egotism, caught up with the insatiable yearning to “keep up with the Joneses” and to always want. I have learned to look deep into myself, into my soul as Merton would say, and to admit that I am not living my life to its fullness—a life of helping others, of hearing the suffering of others above the din of the earth shuddering from our collective selfishness, and, above all, of learning to surrender to the creative action of love and grace. I hope to become more like the man who came into my life when my eyes were wide shut.