Meaning and Explanation.
Our words are Veni Spiritus Maranatha.
This is a combination of Latin and Aramaic. Veni Spiritus means “come spirit.”
Maranatha is an Aramiac word that is sometimes translated as “Come Lord Jesus. More correctly in Aramaic it is “The Lord Has Come.”
Aramiac was the language that Jesus spoke. Greek was the language that most of the Bible was written in. Latin was the language of the first bibles of Christinity. Maranatha is one of the few Aramiac words that have come to us through the bible.
Past and present tenses in Aramaic are different than they are in Greek and Latin. We live in the world created by these languages. In our world we tend to think of the future as something that’s before us and the past as something that’s happened. It’s behind us.
In Aramaic, and in many native traditions, the past is the thing that has gone before us. The past is before us and we are following along. Everything that has happened to create out current world has gone along before us. The future is coming along behind us. So we are creating the world for the future, for the people that will be in the future. The past is what has created the world that we live. We’re on a timeline of happening.
You can see how these two ways of looking at the timeline are opposite.
We think the future as something before us, and we’re going into the future. Aramiac sees future as something behind us. This led to a different translation of the word Maranatha.
Latin translators saw this Aramaic word as something that is before us so they translated it as something that is going to happen in the future. It’s before us so we’re moving towards it. Come Lord Jesus.
But the way the word worked in Aramaic was that this thing that went before us has already happened. Maranatha. The Lord has come.
This isn’t something that will happen in the future. This isn’t something we are waiting for. We’re sitting here, already, in this world that has been created by this presence.
Veni Spiritus, in Latin means ‘come spirit.’ And Maranatha means the spirit has already come. So in this song we are singing this juxtaposition of two different ways to look at how we’re moving through time.
Play along with this song and sing. It’s very beautiful. It brings harmony into your life. Let it get stuck in your head, like all these other songs I do. Let it do its magic inside you to bring out the mystical side of your being.
Also, intellectually, play around with this idea of time. Is salvation something that’s in the future, that’s going to come? Or are we already participating in a world that is created correctly, and that has everything that we need in it to live beautifully.