Whole Being: Life Alchemy
Being, Belonging, Becoming
Pilgrims Walking Toward the Sacred
We need to compost a word. Not to throw it away, but to let the old husk rot back into something fertile. The word pilgrim has been misused, pressed into service by conquest and cross-bearing agendas. But the word itself, like a seed inside a bone, remembers something older. Something softer.
A pilgrim is not a colonizer.
Let me say that again:
A pilgrim is not a colonizer.
Colonizers arrive to take. To name, to own, to bend the land into a mirror that reflects only themselves. But a pilgrim arrives empty. Cupped. Unmade. She doesn’t carry maps, she carries questions. And maybe a scallop shell. Or maybe just an ache behind the ribs that won’t stop humming.
The trouble is, the mythos of the “Pilgrim” was hijacked. Especially in the American context. We picture buckled shoes and stiff white collars, manifest destiny sewn into the seams. We forget that the true pilgrim walks not toward domination, but through dissolution.
She is not the missionary who arrives with a book and a blueprint.
She is the wanderer who lays down her name in the dust.
Pilgrimage predates religion. It predates nations. It predates the concept of “arriving.” It’s a ritual of rupture. You walk because you need to break. Because your story has snagged on a thorn and you need to find the thread again. Pilgrimage is the art of getting lost on purpose.
There is no crusade in the pilgrim’s steps. There is no claim. Only the slow deconstruction of what she thought she was.
Today’s pilgrims are not draped in relics and rosaries.
They walk into hospice rooms and courtrooms.
They walk into compost piles and police brutality protests.
They walk into themselves, into the thickets of grief and identity, praying with their blistered soles.
Pilgrimage is not a sacred site.
It is the sacred sore.
It is not about the bones of saints but about your own bones, rattling with stories that want to be rewritten. It is about walking until your name wears off your tongue and you are left only with the language of dirt and silence and wild geese overhead.
We must take back this word from the crisp linen of Thanksgiving pageants and tuck it under our tongues like a piece of flint.
We are not settlers.
We are searchers.
And to search is not to conquer, it is to let yourself be rearranged.
So yes, the word “pilgrim” has a bad rap. Because it was drafted into wars it never signed up for. But deep in its marrow, it still remembers how to walk. It remembers holy feet kissing stone, remembers prayers spoken with breath and sweat and the quiet generosity of strangers.
The true pilgrim walks toward something she can never fully name. Not to convert, but to be converted. Not by doctrine, but by the shape of wind in olive trees. By stories etched into moss. By the way her muscles unlearn the rigid choreography of being right.
She walks because something is missing.
Not from the world, but from herself.
So let’s rescue the word. Dust it off. Pin it to our spirits like a scallop shell. And begin again, walking not to arrive, but to be undone.
Because the sacred isn’t waiting at the end of the trail.
It is the trail.
And it speaks with every step.
There’s a powerful quote from Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and a scholar of Native history, speaking about the Pilgrim myth and its impact:
“The myth of the First Thanksgiving is just that, a myth. It’s a feel-good story told to erase the genocide and land theft that followed the arrival of the Pilgrims. Our people helped them survive, but that kindness was not repaid. The Pilgrim story has become a tool to silence and sanitize what really happened.”
— Paula Peters, Mashpee Wampanoag
This quote appears in the PBS Native Voices blog post titled “Thanksgiving: The Holiday That Isn’t”, which explores how the Thanksgiving narrative obscures Indigenous loss and resistance.
The Pilgrims of the Mayflower were not on a traditional spiritual pilgrimage like those walking to Santiago or Jerusalem. Instead, they were English Separatists, a radical Protestant sect who felt that the Church of England was too corrupt to reform. Because of this, they were persecuted, harassed, fined, sometimes imprisoned, and they fled first to the Netherlands for religious freedom.
But even in the Netherlands, they didn’t quite fit. They feared losing their cultural and religious identity in the more liberal Dutch society. So, in 1620, a group of them set sail for what they called the "New World", not as pilgrims in the ancient sense, but as exiles, settlers, and in some sense, nation-builders.
They weren’t walking toward sacred transformation.
They were looking for land, security, and a place to preserve their way of life.
Why Were They Called “Pilgrims”?
The term “Pilgrims” wasn’t widely used for them until much later. William Bradford, a leader of the group, referred to them in his journal as pilgrimes, drawing on the biblical idea of being strangers in a strange land. The name didn’t stick until the late 18th and 19th centuries, when American writers and politicians wanted to create a foundational myth, a sort of moral origin story for the United States. That’s when they got canonized as “The Pilgrims”, with a capital P, complete with hats, buckles, and Thanksgiving dinners. This new myth gave the word pilgrim a kind of nationalistic, moral authority, even though their actual history involved taking land, asserting dominance, and starting a cycle of colonial violence.
So, were they pilgrims? In the metaphorical or biblical sense, maybe. But in the ancient, sacred, seeking sense? Not really. They were displaced, rigidly devout, and politically motivated.
Their journey was not a surrender to transformation, but an attempt to create a society in their own image. That’s how the word got co-opted—because their story was retold, again and again, through a lens that erased Indigenous voices and reframed colonialism as courage.
Origins of the Word "Pilgrim"
The word pilgrim comes from the Latin "peregrinus", meaning foreign or traveler. In medieval Europe, it described someone who journeyed to a sacred site—like Jerusalem, Rome, or Santiago de Compostela—often on foot, with a spirit of penance, devotion, or transformation. Pilgrimage was deeply personal and usually marked by a relinquishing of power, not an exertion of it.
The reputation of the word began to shift around the 17th century, especially with the story of the Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620.
These English Separatists left England seeking religious freedom and landed in what they called "the New World." They later became mythologized in U.S. history as the humble founders of a Christian nation. But here's what happened:
Colonial Intentions: Though the original Pilgrims weren’t outright colonizers in the way later settlers were, they did establish permanent settlements on Indigenous land, bringing with them European diseases, land ownership concepts, and a deep Christian exclusivism.
Thanksgiving Myth: Over time, their story was romanticized, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, into a sanitized narrative of peaceful coexistence with Native Americans (symbolized by Thanksgiving), ignoring the ensuing violence, displacement, and genocide.
Cultural Co-optation: The image of the “Pilgrim” in American history textbooks became a symbol of moral rightness, divine mission, and manifest destiny, rather than a seeker on a sacred path.
Result: Pilgrim as Colonizer
By the late 1800s into the 20th century, pilgrim in the American context had come to mean: White Christian settler, civilizing force and symbol of national origin rooted in conquest
This is when the word’s reputation began to suffer, especially as Indigenous voices, postcolonial thinkers, and historians pushed back against the whitewashed myth.
Reclaiming the Word Today
Contemporary thinkers, spiritual seekers, and poets are reclaiming pilgrim in its older, sacred, and subversive sense:
As someone who walks into mystery, not with answers but with humility.
As a witness, not a conqueror.
As a person in right relationship with the land, story, and self.