Christina the Astonishing

Today is the feast day of St Christina the Astonishing, a 12th-century saint from Sint-Truiden, in what is now Belgium. Having suffered a massive seizure of some kind, she was taken for dead, but in the midst of her funeral service 'she arose full of vigour, stupefying with amazement the whole city of Sint-Truiden'. She had, she said, visited Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, and now, on her return, she could not bear the smell of the sinful people gathered in the church. She duly levitated up to the rafters to escape the stench, and hovered there for some while. 
  On returning to terra firma, Christina embraced a life of extreme destitution and privation, shunning human contact and seeking out anything that would cause her to suffer. According to accounts of her life, she would throw herself into burning furnaces, suffering agonies but emerging quite unhurt. In the depths of winter she would fling herself into the river Meuse, spending hours or even days in the icy waters, praying and begging for mercy. Sometimes she would allow herself to be carried down to a mill, where the mill wheel 'whirled her round in a manner frightful to behold', but of course she emerged unscathed. This – and absolutely nothing else – Christina had in common with the far from saintly Laurence Sterne, who, as a boy in Ireland, had once fallen into a mill-race and been carried right round the wheel (had 'been through the mill'), but emerged, like the saint, quite unharmed. 
  In later life Christina the Astonishing quietened down, living, surprisingly, to the age of 74. Fans of Nick Cave might recall that he tells something of her story in his song 'Christina the Astonishing', from the 1992 album Henry's Dream...