The monk Thomas Merton, photographed in 1967 at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky, where he lived in his hermitage.

Thomas Merton’s friend, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, photographed him over a year-and-a-half period between 1967 and ‘68, taking a total of 116 photos. The first series of images, according to a book about their friendship, came about from “a lunch at Gethsemani, where the two met for a four-hour winter conversation over Trappist cheese and bread, with bourbon from one of the distilleries nearby.”

We took a magnifying glass to the cover image but can’t confirm with 100 percent certainty what Merton is drinking in the photo, though we did read one of his journal entries mentioning Schlitz. “Blazing bright days, cool nights, my face still hot from burn as we sat yesterday at the top of the long new farm cornfield…in noon sun and drank some beer,” he wrote.

In downtown Louisville ten years earlier, on March 18, 1958, Merton had his famous epiphany about belonging while running errands near the bustling corner of Fourth and Walnut (now Muhammad Ali Boulevard). “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization,” he wrote, “that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.

“And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

“If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time.”