A Weekend With Father Seán ÓLaoire

Last updated on: October 12, 2026 at 3:24 pm by Alexander Koritz

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A Weekend With Father Seán ÓLaoire 2026-10-12T15:24:37-06:00 Alexander Koritz

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I recently spent several days with Father Seán ÓLaoire and a small group of his students at his home in the mountains above Healdsburg, California. I’d followed his work for years, but this was the first time I’d spent real time with him in person.

Father Seán is tall and thin, with long gray hair and a long gray beard. He could pass for Merlin, or Gandalf. He lives off the grid. His house sits on the crest of a mountain with a 360-degree view of valleys full of redwoods and oaks, and across his acres of wilderness he has placed religious statues and sacred objects from traditions around the world.

My own spiritual path has zigzagged. I explored Eastern spirituality and Western esotericism but still wanted to hold on to some form of the Christianity I grew up with. I also set out to understand the spirituality of my pre-Christian ancestors, the Celts of Scotland and Wales. I admired how much they valued nature and how they saw spirituality and the natural world as belonging together.

Then I found Celtic Christianity. It gave me a way to honor my Christian faith while acknowledging my ancestors’ spirituality, and Father Seán embodied that connection. Along the way, I began studying with him and joined his online spiritual community, Companions on the Journey.

Father Seán showing his favorite meditation spot on the mountain

Over meals and walks that weekend, he told us about his life. His mother’s father was a Druid and a bard who gave the young Seán a love of Irish stories, music and old myths. His great-grandmother was a Christian mystic who talked to the Virgin Mary as if Mary were standing next to her in the kitchen. Not a bad lineage for a future teacher of Celtic Christianity.

He grew up in Cork, Ireland, and studied mathematics and physics before entering the seminary. He was ordained in 1972 and soon left Ireland for Kenya, where he spent 14 years as a missionary with the Kalenjin people. He learned Swahili and several tribal languages and treasured the people’s stories and proverbs. His time there ended during a famine. He was bringing food to 19 villages when he discovered that a government official was using soldiers to take the food and sell it. Father Seán called him out in public. Not long after, he stood before the district commissioner and was given 48 hours to leave the country.

He left on May 20, 1986. He calls it one of the saddest days of his life.

After his expulsion, he had a dream instructing him to smuggle Celtic Christianity into Silicon Valley. When he told me about the dream, I had to smile at the word “smuggle.” It fits, though. He was bringing a nature-based spirituality into the center of the tech world.

In California, he went to work for the Diocese of San Jose. Over time, the diocese began censoring him over his views on ordaining women and on reincarnation. In 2010, he says, a letter arrived from the Vatican telling him he could no longer call himself a Catholic priest or teach in Catholic institutions.

He kept teaching anyway. With plenty of Irish stubbornness, he continued leading Companions on the Journey, which he co-founded in 1997, and holding Mass for people from many religious backgrounds.

One of his central teachings is to build a personal cosmology: what each of us believes about God, the cosmos and our place in it. Most of us never actually choose those beliefs. We absorb them from our parents, the church we grew up in, school, science or the culture around us. Father Seán asks people to look at those beliefs honestly and decide what they really hold to be true, and whether those beliefs bring them closer to God and make them kinder to the people around them.

He sees us as spiritual beings living for a while in bodies, which he calls “space suits.” His beliefs about reincarnation and the feminine face of God cost him his place in the Catholic Church, but I never saw any anger or bitterness in him.

Father Seán is curious and funny, and he gives his full attention to whoever he’s talking with. Even with a group of guests to look after, he went out of his way to spend one-on-one time with each of us. On a walk one afternoon, he talked about the Tuatha Dé Danann of ancient Irish lore and whether they might have been refugees from Atlantis. He showed me the flowers and exotic fruit trees he grows and told me about the dogs and cats he’s had over the years. Listening to him, I thought of Saint Francis.

Dinner with Father Seán and friends.

Celtic spirituality grew out of the land. It finds the holy in trees, rocks, rivers and animals, and it developed in a place where the line between this world and the next can feel thin. Father Seán brought that to California along with what he learned in Africa, his background in mathematics and psychology, and years of studying the world’s mystical traditions. He’s as comfortable preaching from the Bhagavad Gita as from the Gospel of John.

I fell in love with his teaching because it helped me make sense of my own spiritual life. Christ is still at the center of my faith. My years studying Eastern traditions, especially the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda and Ram Dass, and becoming a certified meditation teacher brought me closer to Christ, and I found those teachings fit well with Father Seán’s. He is Christian to the bone, but he draws on Celtic spirituality, Buddhism, Vedanta and other traditions to give his students a unified view of what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy.

On our last day, he gave us a tour of his property and showed us the damage from the wildfires that devastated this part of California a few years ago. When the fire came and he realized he had to evacuate, he placed a special statue of Mother Mary in an upper windowsill of his home. He prayed and asked Her to protect the house, then left at the last minute. The surrounding hills burned, and many of his neighbors lost everything, but his house was spared. As he tells it, a ring of divine protection surrounded his home.

By the time I came home, I understood why he calls himself a spiritual smuggler.

Gathering for an outdoor Mass on the mountain

Celtic Spirituality

Contemplative Christianity

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