Once, on a road trip in Greece, I stopped with my husband and dad at a centuries-old Orthodox monastery to view its famous frescoes. We were in luck, the porter said: It was a feast day. The relics of the monastery’s saintly founder were on view for public veneration.
As a Catholic and a medievalist, I can never resist meeting a new saint. The relic, it turned out, was the saint’s hand, though without any special ornament or reliquary, the ornate containers in which relics are often displayed. Nothing but one plain, severed hand in a glass box, its fingers partly contorted, and its discolored skin shriveled onto the bones.
