A ruler of the Jews comes to Jesus after dark with a careful speech prepared, and never gets past the opening line — because the answer he gets is not an argument but a diagnosis. You cannot be born a second time, which is true, and which is exactly the point: you had nothing to do with the first one either.
Lyrics
[Intro]
Spiritus
Renatus
Spiritus
The wind blows where it will
Born again
[Verse]
I came to Him by candlelight.
I brought my learning. Brought it right.
He never let me say it through.
He said, you must be born anew.
(Spiritus)
[Verse]
I said, a man that's old and grown,
He cannot go back on his own.
(Spiritus)
And I was right. I proved it too.
I cannot do it. Nor can you.
(Renatus)
[Pre]
And something moved across the floor.
I'd never felt the like before.
It did not ask. It did not wait.
It came in through the bolted gate.
[Chorus]
THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT WILL
THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT WILL
You hear it pass. You scan the sky.
You don't know where. You don't know why.
BORN AGAIN
BORN AGAIN
[Verse]
You did not pick your mother's face.
You did not choose the day, the place.
(Spiritus)
Nobody asked you. Still you came.
The second birth works just the same.
(Renatus)
[Verse]
I had the books. I had the seat.
I had the law of God complete.
(Spiritus)
He did not argue me at all.
He told me I was dead. That's all.
(Renatus)
[Pre]
It doesn't ask. It doesn't wait.
It moves the grass. It shakes the gate.
It did not come because I called.
It came. And that was all.
[Chorus]
THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT WILL
THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT WILL
You don't know when. You watch the door.
You don't know when. You don't know more.
BORN AGAIN
BORN AGAIN
[Bridge]
I could not make myself be born.
I could not do it once before.
(Spiritus)
No man has built his own first breath.
No man has talked his way through death.
It's done to you. It isn't won.
It's done to you. And then it's done.
(Spiritus)
[Bridge]
Renatus ex aqua et Spiritu
Spiritus
Renatus ex aqua et Spiritu
Spiritus
Renatus ex aqua et Spiritu
[Bridge]
The first time out, I came by night.
The last time out, I came by light.
(Spiritus)
I brought the spice. I brought my name.
I stood there when the soldiers came.
[Pre]
I did not know what it would cost.
I know now. And I'd pay it twice.
[Chorus]
THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT WILL
THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT WILL
I don't know where. I don't know why.
I know that I was dead. Now I'm alive.
BORN AGAIN
BORN AGAIN
BORN AGAIN
[Outro]
Renatus ex aqua et Spiritu
Spiritus
Renatus ex aqua et Spiritu
Spiritus
The wind blows where it will
Born again.
Born again.
Song Meaning
SPIRITUS (Born Again)
John 3
Go outside tonight and find the wind.
You won't. Not the thing itself — it has never once been seen by anybody. What you'll find is a hedge leaning, a flag straining, a plastic bag going sideways down an empty street. You will stand in the middle of something enormous and invisible and know it is there only because the world around you is bending.
Hold on to that, and you have the whole of John chapter 3.
A MAN COMES AFTER DARK
Nicodemus is not a bystander.
He sits on the Sanhedrin, the ruling council of his nation. He is a Pharisee, which in the first century described a man who had given his entire life to getting the law of God exactly right — not a hypocrite by definition, whatever the word has come to mean since, but a specialist, a man of enormous discipline and real conviction. Jesus addresses him, with the definite article in the Greek, as the teacher of Israel. If there was a short list of the most religiously accomplished men alive that year, his name was on it.
He comes at night, and John never tells us why, and every reason you can think of is probably partly true. Discretion. Reputation. A meeting that would end a career if the wrong colleague heard about it. John simply notes the hour and moves on, and then spends the rest of his gospel making light and darkness mean something.
He arrives with a speech prepared. It opens with a compliment — we know you are a teacher come from God; no one could do these things unless God were with him — and it is the careful, generous opening a diplomat uses to begin a negotiation between equals.
He never gets to the second paragraph.
Jesus interrupts him with a sentence that answers nothing he has said: unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
And Nicodemus objects. A grown man cannot climb back into his mother and start over.
Then comes the line this song is built on. The wind blows where it wants to. You hear it go past. You cannot tell where it started or where it is headed. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.
Nicodemus goes home. We do not hear another word from him for four chapters.
THE OBJECTION IS THE POINT
Start with the objection, because the objection is not a failure of imagination. It is the correct answer, and it is exactly why Jesus chose that image and no other.
You cannot be born a second time. True.
You also had nothing whatever to do with the first one.
Nobody in the history of the world has arranged his own conception. You did not select your parents, your century, your body, your language, or the hour you arrived. You were not consulted. You did not contribute. You were not present for the part that mattered. And then one day you were here, handed to yourself as a finished fact, and every single thing you have done since — every choice, every conviction, every good and worthy act — has been done by a person who did not make himself.
That is what born again means, and it is why the phrase ought to stop us short instead of sliding past. Jesus did not say turn over a new leaf. He did not say make a decision, or try harder, or get religion. He said be born — the one category of event that has never once in human history been achieved by the person it happened to.
Which makes the next thing quietly devastating. He does not say you may be born again. He says you must. He states a requirement that the man in front of him is constitutionally unable to meet. It is like telling a dead man that he must have a pulse. True, urgent, non-negotiable, and entirely outside his power.
If that lands as bad news, stay with it. It is the doorway to the best news there has ever been.
WHAT THE WIND IS DOING
The illustration in verse 8 is doing three things at once, and most readers notice only the first.
You cannot control it. It goes where it wants. It has never once asked permission of a field it crossed.
You cannot trace it. You do not know where a gust began. You do not know where it will die out. The new birth is not a thing anyone can schedule, verify by formula, or reverse-engineer from a person's behaviour on a Tuesday. There are people who have sat in a pew for forty years and have never been born. There are people who were born last night in a hospital parking lot and could not tell you what happened to them.
And it is invisible, but it is not undetectable. You know it by what moves. The grass goes over. The gate rattles. The flame leans. You never see the thing itself; you see the whole world bending around it.
That is the only evidence anybody ever gets, and it turns out to be enough.
THE EXAM HE FAILED
Here is where it gets good — and here is where even people who have taught this passage for years sometimes walk straight past the door.
When Nicodemus stumbles, Jesus turns on him with a question that sounds like a general insult and is in fact a specific accusation: Are you the teacher of Israel, and you do not know these things?
That is not a vague complaint about spiritual dullness. It is a citation. Jesus is telling him the answer was already sitting in the books he had spent his life memorising — and it is possible to name the pages.
Go to Ezekiel, chapters 36 and 37.
In chapter 36, God promises to sprinkle clean water on his people and make them clean; to give them a new heart and a new spirit; to take out the heart of stone and put in a heart of flesh; and to place his own Spirit within them.
Water. And Spirit. In that order. In one promise.
Which means that when Jesus says a man must be born of water and of the Spirit, he is not inventing a sacrament and he is not being cryptic. He is quoting the homework. Nicodemus should have recognised the reference the way a lawyer recognises a case citation.
And then chapter 37 — the valley of dry bones. A prophet standing in a canyon full of the very dead. God tells him to prophesy to the breath, to summon it from the four winds, and the Hebrew word there is ruach, which — exactly like the Greek pneuma and the Latin spiritus — means wind, and breath, and Spirit, all at once, with no way to prise them apart.
The wind comes. And a valley of skeletons stands up on its feet.
So when Jesus says the wind blows where it wills, he is not reaching for a pleasant image from nature. He is saying: you have read this. There is a chapter in your own scriptures where the ruach blows where it wills across a field of corpses and the corpses get up. That is what I am describing. That is what has to happen to you.
The teacher of Israel is being examined on material he already owns, and he is failing — and the failure is itself the proof of the doctrine. A man cannot see the kingdom until he is born into it. And here is the most religiously educated man in the country, sitting eighteen inches from the Son of God, unable to follow the argument.
Note the verbs, too. Verse 3 says see the kingdom. Verse 5 says enter it. Neither is on offer to the unborn.
THREE THINGS THAT DIE IN ENGLISH
The word translated again in verse 3 is anothen, and it carries both again and from above. Jesus almost certainly means from above. Nicodemus hears again, which is why he starts talking about wombs. The misunderstanding that drives the entire conversation is a pun, and no English Bible can carry it — and both senses are true at once. It is a second birth, and it comes down from somewhere else.
The second is pneuma in verse 8, which is wind and breath and Spirit in a single word. Read the verse in Greek and the sentence slides from weather to God halfway through without announcing the transition. That is why the chant beneath this track is in Latin: spiritus keeps what English is forced to surrender.
The third is not a pun but is easy to miss. In verse 7, ye must be born again, the ye is plural. Nicodemus had opened by saying we know — he was speaking for a faction, a delegation, a class of men. Jesus answers the plural. It is not only you, Nicodemus. It is all of you. Every last one, credentials and all.
WHICH COMES FIRST
This is the point where the Reformed tradition says something the wider church often flinches at, and this song says it on purpose.
The question is simple: does a person get born again because he believed, or does he believe because he was born again?
The analogy settles it, and the analogy is airtight. Nobody's faith caused his own conception. A child does not decide to be conceived and thereby bring itself about. Life comes first; everything the living person does comes after — including every good and true thing he will ever choose.
John has already said as much in his opening chapter: those who received him were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Three human contributions named and ruled out in a single line, the middle one being precisely the will.
And in his first letter, the grammar closes the case. Everyone believing that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God — the believing is a present participle, and has been born is perfect tense: a completed act standing behind a continuing faith. The birth is not the consequence. It is the antecedent. The believing is how you find out it happened.
So regeneration is not a wage paid to faith. It is the living heart that makes faith possible.
None of which means anyone is dragged in unwilling, and the old confessions were careful about this in a way their critics rarely are. The Canons of Dort insist that God does not deal with men as though they were blocks of wood — he does not abolish the will, he revives it, heals it, bends it. The change is not made to the door. The change is made to you. And afterward, if you ask that person whether he was forced, he will look at you as though you are mad. He will say he finally saw it.
Ask a man who has just woken up whether the morning was imposed on him.
A HUNDRED POUNDS OF MYRRH
The passage does not end in chapter 3, and neither does Nicodemus, and this is the part that turns the whole thing from an argument into a person.
He appears twice more in John's gospel.
In chapter 7, the council is moving against Jesus, and Nicodemus opens his mouth — carefully, procedurally, the way a cautious man does — and asks whether their own law permits condemning a man before hearing him. It is the smallest possible act of courage. They round on him instantly and sneer.
And then chapter 19. Jesus is dead on a cross. The disciples have scattered. And Nicodemus comes — in daylight, in public, with his name attached — carrying roughly a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to bury an executed criminal.
A hundred pounds is not a gesture. That is the quantity used to bury a king, and the sheer weight of it is the kind of thing that requires help to carry through a city street where everybody knows your face. Handling a corpse rendered him ceremonially unclean in the middle of Passover. Publicly claiming the body of a man the council had just killed ended whatever standing he had left.
The man who came in the dark so that nobody would see him ended up on a hill in the middle of the afternoon, in front of Roman soldiers and everyone he worked with, spending a fortune on a dead man.
Nobody argued him there.
That is the wind. You could not have seen it coming, you cannot trace where it began, and the only evidence that it moved through a room one night in chapter 3 is that a careful man later did something reckless, and then something that cost him everything.
You never see the thing itself. You see what moves.
IF YOU'RE NEW TO ALL THIS
Perhaps you are here because the track sounded good and half the above was Greek — some of it literally. Here it is with nothing assumed.
The claim of Christianity is not that you are basically decent and need some polish. The claim is that something is wrong with you at a level you cannot reach. Not merely that you have done wrong things, though you have, and so has everyone involved in making this song. The deeper trouble is that the part of you that would want God is not working. You are not neutral about him and never have been. Left to yourself you will not choose him — not because somebody is barring the door, but because you don't want to, and the wanting is the very thing that is broken.
That is the bad news, and it is worse than most versions you will hear. It is also the only version that explains why trying harder has never fixed anybody.
Here is the rest.
God did not stand at a distance waiting for people to climb up to him. He came down himself, into a real country with a real occupation and a real dust problem, as a man. He lived the life we were meant to live. And then he was executed — not as an accident, not as a tragedy that overtook him, but as the thing he came to do. On that cross he took what was owed for the sin of every person who would ever trust him, and paid it, and said it was finished. Three days later he walked out of a sealed tomb, and was seen by hundreds of people, most of whom went on to die badly rather than admit they had made it up.
And now he gives life to the dead. Not to the improved. Not to the sincere. To the dead.
If something here is landing in a way you cannot quite account for — if you are still reading when you meant to close the tab ten minutes ago — that may not be you being thoughtful.
That may be the wind in the room.
You do not need a formula or a particular set of words. Turn around and tell him you are his. Ask him for the thing you cannot manufacture. Then find some actual Christians in an actual building, and get a Bible, and start in the gospel of John — which is where you have just been.
The wind blows where it wants to.
And it has never once needed permission from a field.
A NOTE ON THE LATIN
Spiritus is the Vulgate's word in John 3 — and in Latin, as in the Greek beneath it and the Hebrew beneath that, it means wind, breath, and Spirit at the same time. The title is carrying the pun the English translation has to drop.
Renatus means reborn. Renatus ex aqua et Spiritu — born of water and of the Spirit — is the Vulgate of John 3:5.
SCRIPTURE BEHIND THE SONG
Came by candlelight — John 3:1-2, a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews, by night
He never let me say it through — John 3:3, the interruption
A man that's old and grown — John 3:4, the objection, and it is the correct one
Born of water and of Spirit — John 3:5; Ezekiel 36:25-27
The wind blows where it will — John 3:8; Ezekiel 37
He told me I was dead — Ephesians 2:1, dead in trespasses and sins
No man has built his own first breath — John 1:13, not of the will of man, but of God
It's done to you. It isn't won — 1 John 5:1, the perfect tense behind the believing
I came by night / I came by light — John 7:50-51; John 19:39
I brought the spice — John 19:39, about a hundred pound weight of myrrh and aloes
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.
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