In the 12th and 13th centuries, there was a Belgian holy woman called Christina the Astonishing. Around her late twenties, she had a seizure so massive that everyone thought she died. They brought her to her funeral mass the next day and the priest began to sing the Agnus Dei: agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.” When he began to sing it for the third time, she rose up from the coffin, awake and alive, and floated to the top of the church like a bird. Though the congregation fled from the church in fear, the priest stayed to insist through the power of the Eucharist that she come down from there at once. Later, she told her sisters she had died and seen hell and purgatory and heaven. Jesus gave her two choices: she could stay in heaven with him or return to earth and endure suffering in her body as penance for others. She chose to return.
If you haven’t heard of Christina before, I can assure you that this is only where her story starts to get astonishing. When she returned, she found that she could smell the stench of sin on people all around her. It was so overwhelming that she lived away from people in the wilderness or the tops of trees.
Quite regularly she launched herself into fire and submerged herself into the icy river – for hours or even days at a time. Though she cried out in pain, she would emerge unharmed. At times they arrested her because they thought she had a demon; chains couldn’t hold her. They tried to boil her alive and she ladled the water over herself like she was in a hot tub. Once, she riled up all the dogs in the city so that they angrily chased after her. She ran towards the woods that were thick with thorns. She was scratched up, but still there were no wounds.
It wasn’t all feats of pain. She prayed for others; counseled them; prophesied; and lived in extreme poverty, eating scraps with hopes to inspire people to repentance. She believed that the more she suffered in the body, the less those she cared for would suffer in the afterlife.
Near the end of her life, an Abbot called Thomas saw her entering a church and followed her in secret. As her prayer began, she threw herself down in front of the altar and wept, beating her breast and body. She said, “O miserable and wretched body! How long will you torment me…? Why do you delay me from seeing the face of Christ?”
The question behind the question is as simple as it is intricate: why do we have these bodies?
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Once Christina the Astonishing finished praying and beating her body, she spoke up in the voice of her body – now arguing with her soul: “O miserable soul! Why are you tormenting me in this way? What is keeping you in me and what is it that you love in me?” After a time, she “rested a little in silence and, burning most purely with a holy thought directed toward God… [she] was inwardly filled with such joy that one would believe her…body would burst.”
Resources:
https://canvas.uchicago.edu/courses/10171/files/1071944/download?download_frd=1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_the_Astonishing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnus_Dei