Approaching spirituality in fiction sensitively?

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I've been working on a fictional piece that is meant to be magical realism in the 1920s. The theme is "ghosts" and it revolves around the spiritualist/medium type movement at the time. But it's kind of about emotional ghosts and things in our past, collectively and individually. For example, the "Roaring 20s" as a reaction to WW1. I don't have a general theme and much of it comes across as incoherent, I believe. It opens in 1925.

Here are the characters:

Charles "Charlie" Hamilton: A disabled WW1 veteran who is trying to collect benefits but is accused of falsifying his identity. He denies this but is denied benefits. He ends up meeting a woman named Czeslawa Mazurski and entering the spiritualism movement. He himself is in tune with ghosts from the battlefield, and has several ghosts who share his "headspace". These include:

1. An Irish soldier that Charlie met during the Somme Offensive. He is levelheaded and behaves like a father figure to Charlie. It becomes clear later on that he did not die in WW1 and is much older than he seems, although he doesn't respond to questions about his age other than saying that he's "old".
2. A French nurse named Marine who claims to have been killed recently. Like the Irish soldier, she turns out to be much older than she claims. It's actually unclear if she was ever "human". She belongs to a network of mystical operatives who rewrite history and memories as they see fit. Her network is somewhat disorganized with no clear mission at the moment, though, and sometimes she seems to act on her own.

Charlie dislikes mediums taking advantage of grief-stricken families, and he considers the rise of spiritualism to be a "fad". Meeting Czeslawa, he realizes that she has real gifts, and that she is attempting to understand why some people have the gifts they do.

Czeslawa has the ability to see the "ghosts" of people, aka their motivations and things in their past. She can see symbols and numerology on their skin and as an aura around them, and she devotes much time to deciphering it. She was raised Roman Catholic, but retains little interest in the faith aside from its significance to her identity as Polish-American. She reads Tarot cards to people to get them to open up to her, and she has an affinity for the Popess Tarot Card, which she says is very useful at gauging people when they react to it.

Czeslawa was born at 12:01 am, 1900. Her twin brother Jakub was born at 11:59 pm, 1899. He has the ability to see people's intentions. In spite of his attachment to psychic abilities, he is a devout Roman Catholic due to claiming to be able to "hear God's voice". He wishes to become a Priest. The other psychics regard him as a little crazy.

Jakub is friends with a woman named Nadege. Nadege has the ability to manipulate minds and memories. Unbeknownst to Czeslawa, Nadege and Jakub have manipulated her memories and powers because beforehand, the information overload of people's secrets and angsts made it almost impossible to go out in public. Jakub has asked Nadege to modify his memories too, because of painful episodes in his past and wanting to let go of trauma.

The twist is this: Nadege is an amnesiac operative from Marine's network. Upon meeting Czeslawa, she was automatically "wiped clean" of her memories in order to keep Czeslawa from reading her and her organization. Marine wishes to reclaim Nadege, who unconsciously adopted her "Nadege" persona because she was in love with Jakub and wanted to be with him. Marine had no physical body with which to interact with the world, so she came across a young soldier who would serve as a good vessel.

This soldier did not initially call himself "Charlie Hamilton." His original name was Roger Goldin and he was from a German-Jewish background. He was also fifteen when he signed up for service. He had wanted a way to make money and get to travel, and sought to distance himself from a background that was causing his family problems. He didn't have a good education and was sort of the "black sheep" of the family, but he was strong and athletic, and the military had presented itself as high opportunity for advancement. (His character is being reckless and not very smart, at least initially, so if this doesn't seem like a well-thought through plan, imagine that it's the brainchild of an impulsive and kind of clueless 15-year old boy, bc it's supposed to be.)

Upon arriving in battle, though, he was assaulted with spirits of the dead that wanted his company. Absorbing their memories left him psychologically scarred, which was when Marine began to rework his personality and memories into a "blank vessel" she could use. Roger (or "Hodge" which was his nickname) ended up absorbed into Marine's own small headspace. Upon meeting Czeslawa, though, he is able to leave Marine and wander freely, although Czeslawa is the only person who can see him. He has hallucinatory memories that he can make manifest to Czeslawa, and can only physically interact with the world in a poltergeist-y manner.

The rest of the story is kind of up in the air. Czeslawa wants to free Hodge from Marine and learn more about her abilities. Marine wants to reclaim Nadege and keep Czeslawa from inferring anything about her. Nadege wants to marry Jakub and keep Czeslawa under control, Jakub wants the same, but is conflicted with wanting to be a Priest. Hodge wants his body back, and Charlie is kind of conflicted. He's the outer personality who Marine designed to be easily manipulated, and he's afraid of being destroyed if Hodge gets his body back. But he's not as conniving as Marine. Unnamed Irish soldier mainly seems interested in protecting Hodge/Charlie, but is kind of stuck with Marine for the time being. There's more on him but I'm not sure if it's too much already.

I want to approach topics of mythology and spirituality sensitively, but some of the characters are by nature subversive, so conventional religions are hard for them to follow. How does this story seem? It's meant to have this sense of reality as something we can't know about, so it's by nature a little chaotic. Idk though...

Don't write about haunted houses. Write about haunted people.

That's my suggestion.

You don't have to make a frontal attack on Spiritualism.

But write it so that the supernatural entities can be taken either way: as real, or as metaphors for the characters' inner issues.

"I think that that's what ghosts really are. Neuroses. Unfinished business"

That's what Stephen King said.

Does the whole story seem okay or too messy rn?

Messy?

Lets put it this way: its curious that you're constructing the story from the outside-in.

I would do it from the inside out. Figure out what the central plot is, and then flesh it out. Rather than have all these characters and then trying to connect them. Let the reader do the job of trying to connect the trees. You should figure out the forest first.

You got some interesting characters. For example it's very true to life to have a young impetuous guy (maybe with ADHD tendencies) answer the call of duty, and volunteer for the military, and maybe lies about his underage age to join the army, hoping for adventure, and for escape from school, or from working in a factory. And then he becomes traumatized by the grime reality of life and death in the trenches of the Great War. The problem is that you don't need ghosts for that kinda trauma. It was all too common IRL without supernatural help.

So that's a challenge. Making All Quiet on the Western Front into a ghost story- so to speak. But Toni Morrison actually pulled off something kinda like that in the novel "Beloved" (a meditation on the effects of slavery, but done in the guise of a ghost story). But she is Toni Morrison.

I am just thinking aloud about what I, as a reader, would wanna read.

Work on it some more.

You do know your characters cannot be devout Catholics & spiritualists at the same time, right?

Jakub sounds delightfully neurotic; PM me if you want to know about the strange characters I met while in a seminary training for the priesthood...

Okay, yep. I have a tendency to develop characters with little ability to tie them together in a plot...

Yeah the issue is "PTSD + ghosts" vs "ghosts as a metaphor for PTSD", "roaring 20s + ghosts" vs "ghosts that approximate metaphor for 1920s culture".

I have heard some authors make characters with no real plot to tie them together....I don't know how they make them into stories though.....