Fr. Sean O’Laoire: Souls on Safari

June 22, 2025

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Fr. Sean O’Laoire is a Co-Founder and Spiritual Director of Companions on the Journey (COJ), a spiritual community which seeks to recognize the God/divinity within each of us and among all of us. COJ is an independent, non-hierarchical Eucharistic community dedicated to aligning itself with God and healing the separations between us. He is the best-selling author of Spirits in Spacesuits, Souls on Safari and Setting God Free.

An Interview with Fr. Sean O’Laoire: Souls on Safari

Interview by Sandie Sedgbeer

Father Sean O’Laoire is a poet, storyteller, scientist, researcher, wisdom keeper, and licensed clinical psychologist in private practice with an MA and PhD in transpersonal psychology. In this interview with Sandie Sedgbeer, Father O’Laoire discusses some of the provocative topics addressed in his books Spirits in Spacesuits, Souls on Safari and Setting God free, including, Who is God? What is truth? Was Jesus a Christian? Did Moses really exist? What was really behind the mandate of circumcision? And who the heck was Yahweh?

Listen to the full interview of Father Sean O’Laoire by Sandie Sedgbeer.

Sandie Sedgbeer: Father Sean O’Laoire, what is it about you that makes you a rebel?

Fr. Sean O’Laoire: I think having a grandfather who was an extraordinary man. A Druid in many ways, he was always standing up for the underdog. He also was a brilliant Irish step dancer and had his own school of Irish step dancing. So my mother, from the time she was a little child, was step dancing. She told me a story one time. He lived in Cork City, near the famous Blarney castle, and they were going to town every Saturday for their shopping. There was one bus in in the morning that went back in the evening. And they’re coming home one day and come down to the bus office where there’s an old man sitting on the ground scratching on a fiddle, and he’s got his cap in front of him trying to collect a few pennies.

Everybody, of course, is ignoring him. And the guy can’t fiddle for nuts. He’s terrible. But my grandfather’s a great fiddle player, and my mother was a great step dancer. So he said to my mother, “Peggy, start dancing.” And she, a 12-year-old girl, is really embarrassed to be dancing in public in front of a beggar sitting on the ground with a cap in front of him. My grandfather took the fiddle and started fiddling, and Peg started dancing. And he collected more money that day than he probably did in the year before that. So he was always a rebel. He was always looking out for the underdog. And my mother was the same. So I grew up with a family always standing up for the underprivileged and the marginalized. So that’s where I got it.

Sandie Sedgbeer: And you stood up to the Catholic church?

Fr. Sean O’Laoire: So, I’ve been thrown out of more places than most people have gotten into, Sandie. I was thrown out of Kenya after 14 years working as a missionary because of my social justice work. At one stage, in the area I lived in, called the Brio Desert, there was a severe famine, and I was bringing in three lorry loads of food every month—from the World Bank, of all places—and distributing it to the 19 villages in my parish. I found out that a local politician who was like an assistant minister in the government was using government troops to take the food from his own people and selling it. He and I clashed furiously at public meetings.

At one stage, the President of the country, who was from the last tribe I worked with, a guy called Daniel Arap Moi, was coming to address a big rally in the area. So I put on my white sutana and I got into this meeting and got grabbed by this special branch CID Chief of Police, dragged before the District Commissioner, and given 48 hours to leave. That was probably the saddest day of my life—20th of May 1986 when I left Kenya for the last time.

I came to the States in 1987. After eight years, they threw me out because I was advocating for women priests in the Catholic Church and talking about reincarnation, which I believe very strongly in, having had several experiences.

Then, on the Feast of St. Francis, October 4th, 2010, I got a two-page letter in Latin from the Vatican telling me they no longer required me, and that I could no longer represent myself as a Catholic priest. I couldn’t teach in any Catholic college, or even a primary school. The only way I could exercise my priesthood was, if somebody was dying and there was no other priest there to hear the confession and shrive them, I could hear the confession and give them absolution. Apart from that, I was out.

So I got thrown out of the diocese of San Jose. I had a friend who was the Principal of a big Catholic school in the next diocese who’d been after me for a few years to work as a Chaplain for the school. So I said, “I’ll work as a Chaplain one day a week if you give me the school auditorium to say mass on Sundays.” The first Sunday, there were 500 people packed into the school auditorium, and we had drained the local parishes. That went on for about six or seven months. And then somebody sent a complaint to the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and he ordered the school Principal to shut us down. He said, “People should be going to mass in their own parishes, not in the school auditorium.”

Sandie Sedgbeer: So, you and Matthew Fox must be good friends, then?

Fr. Sean O’Laoire: Yeah, I’ve I only met him once, and I heard him speak once. I was very impressed by him, but I loved what he did. Matt took refuge in the Episcopal church; they took him under their wings. I set up an organization of my own called Companions on the Journey, which is still going strong 27 years later. I’m a Spiritual Director for that group, it’s non-denominational, so we have people from all backgrounds; Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Christian. And what I advocate is that people need to work on what I call their own personal cosmologies. You can’t import it, but most of us are living, driven by an internalized philosophy of life that we have unconsciously acquired.

There’s this great passage in the gnostic gospel of Thomas, where Thomas says there are six stages to the journey. He says, “Those who seek should not stop searching until they find their truth.” When you do, you will be disturbed. And when you are disturbed, you will marvel. And when you marvel, you will reign. And when you reign, you will rest. So what’s he talking about?

Sandie Sedgbeer: So let’s now talk about some of your books. I love the titles—Spirits in Spacesuits: A Manual for Everyday Mystics. Tell us a little bit about that.

Fr. Sean O’Laoire: I came to the realization many years ago, based on a statement by Teilhard de Chardin, who said, “We are not human beings having occasional spiritual experiences; we’re spirit beings having a human experience. That felt really real to me.

So when I was about to write my first book in English, I wanted a good title that would encapsulate what I was about. And I woke up in the morning and this phrase burned in my head, “Call it Spirits in Spacesuits: A Manual for Everyday Mystics, because we’re all mystics.” Mystics are not special people who live on mountaintops or sit in Zen for their entire lives. Every one of us is a mystic. We’re sourced from God, and we volunteered to come down here. We chose to be here for three-dimensional density. Only the bravest souls in the universe do that. So every one of us is an innate mystic, but we’re born into a system of forgetting, because when we agree to incarnate into 3rd-Dimensionality, we accept four huge limitations.

Sandie Sedgbeer: You followed that book with another great title, Souls on Safari: A Guided Tour of Mystical Wisdom. We are indeed souls on safari, aren’t we?

Fr. Sean O’Laoire: Absolutely. It’s interesting that typically in the English-speaking world, when we hear safari, we think it’s an exotic kind of trip to Africa, watching lions and big game. But in Swahili, the word safari just means a journey. Going to the grocery store for milk is a safari. Any journey is called a safari. But there is no such thing as an ordinary journey. Anytime you set out with a purpose, you are on the journey of the soul. The soul is saying to you, “Sandie, here’s the situation in which you’re going to reveal your mystical nature to the world.”

Sandie Sedgbeer: I want to devote time to this wonderful book that you wrote, called Setting God Free: Moving Beyond the Character That We’ve Created in Our Own Image. You created a courtroom scene to bring Yahweh to trial for crimes against humanity. This book is very irreverent, very amusing, and it’s filled with solid research that debunks a lot of information presented as gospel in the Old Testament. What gave you the idea to use the courtroom?

Fr. Sean O’Laoire: I’m not the first one to do it. The Book of Job did it 2,600 years ago, where Job is really upset with God and calls him to task, and there’s this back and forth between them. Now, Job comes out on the wrong side of that debate. But there was actually an event in Auschwitz when six million Jews were killed, when Elie Wiesel, as a young boy, witnessed a group of Jewish lawyers who put God on trial for abandoning his people. I think the difference between the book I’ve written and Job is that Job is just advocating for himself. In Auschwitz, they were taking God to task for his treatment of the Jewish people, the chosen people.
I’m taking God to task for what appears to be God’s abandonment of humanity. And of course, in the book, I had Bible scholars and archeologists, psychologists and legal experts on both sides, prosecution and defense, putting God on trial. And the ultimate realization was that this God is actually a projection of our own shadow material as individuals and particular cultures. So I’m putting the God of the scriptures on trial because the God of the scriptures is mythology. And once we understand what mythology is about, it has a very powerful message.

So, I put the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tripitaka of Buddhism, and the Quran into this category of mythology; the stories their ancestors told to try to make sense of where they’ve come from, to allow them to survive present vicissitude, and have hope for a future that is better than the present.

Sandie Sedgbeer: So, we are not creatures that are in school to learn how to improve ourselves so that we can come before God?

Fr. Sean O’Laoire: There is no way we can be separated from God. You can no more be separated from God than a ray of sunlight can be separated from the sun. I can put up an umbrella and not feel its effect anymore. But the sun is still shining. God is love. I talk sometimes about the five Ls; that ultimately, there is only love, but love births twins. I call them light and logos. We know from quantum mechanics that all matter is frozen light, literally frozen light. If you could take the light hidden in one human body, you could light up a baseball stadium at 1 million watts for three and a half hours. That’s how much light a single human body contains. So all matter is frozen light.

And so life is the offspring of what happens when you get light and the logos dancing together. And the entire objective of life is to learn how to laugh, to wake up to the realization that we’re living in maya, to realize that there is nothing except love, that birthed light, and logos that gave life, whose objective was to learn how to laugh. And so for me, when I think about God, that’s what I think. Love is the ultimate source. God is love. There’s no way anything could be permanently separated from Source.

For more information on Fr. Sean O’Laoire’s work, books, events, blog posts, and homilies at the website spiritsinspacesuits.com.

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