Christina was the youngest of three orphaned sisters of Brustem near Sint-Truiden. Around the age of twenty-two she had a severe seizure, was pronounced dead, and was laid out for funeral. According to her contemporary biographer Thomas of Cantimpré — a Dominican who knew her — she sat up during the funeral Mass and levitated to the rafters of the church, terrifying everyone present except the priest, who commanded her to come down.
She told her sisters that she had been shown three places — hell, purgatory, and heaven — and given a choice: to remain immediately in heaven, or to return to earth to suffer voluntarily for the souls in purgatory. She had chosen the second. She spent the remaining forty-two years of her life in a series of extraordinary penitential phenomena: rolling herself into hot ovens, leaping into the river Meuse in winter, sleeping in tombs, fleeing to treetops at the smell of human bodies (which had become unbearable to her after the vision), and reputedly levitating in prayer.
Both Thomas of Cantimpré and the older Cistercian Cardinal Jacques de Vitry confirm these phenomena from direct witnesses. Modern medical literature has speculated about a primary seizure disorder with secondary religious experience; her tradition has read her as the type of the vicarious sufferer for souls in purgatory. She is buried at the convent of St. Catherine of Sint-Truiden, where she spent her last years, and her cult was confirmed in the Cistercian Order despite the extreme strangeness of her recorded life.