The Cult of the Saints

I just finished reading a book for my class at Catholic University called "The Cult of the Saints." It had a lot of nothing in it at various points, but it was also full of reasoning regarding the importance of the saints in the growth of the early Church. There are three particular quotes that I love so here they are:

"In a relic, the chilling anonymity of human remains could be thought to be still heavy with the fullness of a beloved person. As Gregory of Nyssa said,
'Those who behold them embrace as it were, the living body in full flower: they bring eye, mouth, ear, all the senses into play, and then, shedding tears of reverence and passion, they address to the martyr their prayers of intercession as though he were present.'"

"...the Christian Church, from an early time, had encouraged women to take on a public role, in their own right, in relation to the poor: they gave alms in person, they visited the sick, they founded shrines and ooorhouses in their own name and were expected to be fuly visible as participants in the ceremonial of the shrines."

"...it is precisely the detachment of the relic from its physical associations that summed up most convincingly the imaginative dialectic we have described. For how better to suppress the fact of death, than to remove part of the dead from its original context in the all too cluttered grave? How better to symbolize the abolition of time in such dead, than to add to that an indeterminacy of space? Furthermore, how better to express the 'inverted magnitudes,' by which the object around which boundless associations clustered should be tiny and compact?...The disparity of sizes further emphasized the magnificence of God's mercy, falling in such clear, tiny drops 'like the gentle dew from Heaven.'"