christina mirabilis

Fêted on this anniversary of her death in Sint-Truiden in 1224 (c. *1150), Christina the Astonishing (H. Christina de Wonderbare) was regarded as a saint in her own time, first for her reported resurrection, dramatically revived and levitating to the church rafters in front of the whole congregation gathered for her funeral after succumbing to a massive seizure and dying.
Later she recounted that she had visited Heaven, Hell and Purgatory and offered the choice to remain in Paradise or be restored to Earth for the sole purpose of delivering souls from the flames of the liminal place. Christina had floated up from the pews to the ceiling because she could no longer tolerate the stench of the sinful parishioners and embarked on a course of extreme penance and privation, conniving new tortures and punishments for herself—including extended wintertime swims in the frozen Meuse and to be carried downstream in the current and crushed by the millstone of a granary on the river. Despite all this behaviour, Christina never suffered injury from her misadventures, venerated in the Limburg region as the patroness of millers, those suffering from mental illness and mental health workers. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ recorded a piece about Christina the Astonishing in their 1992 dream song anthology which recounts her vita and hagiography.