As the human soul makes its trajectory through life, it "lights on" hoped-for objects of connection. From birth to death, the soul is looking for, urgently aspiring to locate, a substitute for the connection with God that it had before it was born.

Unfortunately, the soul is almost always disappointed. That is because no created entity and no living being can satisfy what only God can satisfy. No person that's been made can satisfy the longing for direct connection with Immortal Love which fills every human soul.

Thus hurts are born and wounds are made. Sorrows are indited and pain is pressed in. And, as my first Episcopal bishop said, the man of God I had known as a little boy on the Washington Cathedral Close, on his death bed -- shocking the Diocese of Washington in 1971 -- "Life is tragic."

How are the wounds of life healed?

Well, about 95% of them can be healed under the maxim, "Feel to heal". If the wounded individual will just stop suppressing, displacing, and swallowing the pain of the wound, and, rather, feel it and express it, the pain almost always diminishes. It may not diminish to the point of non-existence. But it very often, when abreacted, when felt, diminishes to the point of being able to be borne.

And yet, and yet, there is about a 5% element within the pain of one's life that is just too deeply buried, too poorly stitched up when it happened, too "immediate" to the child-self inside you, to be healed by being felt. Some sicknesses, to quote SK, are "unto death".

I have observed this fact of life (or death, rather) through years of pastoral ministry. Some problems are, it appears, incurable.

And this is where the experience of spiritual warfare comes to the fore. (I often wish this second element of healing weren't true, because it threatens to cross over into the Twilight Zone or One Step Beyond -- the bizarre and potentially superstitious.) But it is still true! Some of the burdens you and I carry can be healed only through spiritual deliverance, the casting out of demons.

But hey, Jesus did it. He was much less finicky about it, too, than I, for one, constitutionally, am.

So "Come with Me, and Take a Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea".