Maha Puduma Thanikamak

A great, strange loneliness settled into my heart,
and with no one to tell it to, I wept
why did you go and leave me? why did you go and leave me?
I felt I could not bear to be apart from you

Then, with such love, you spoke to me, and I heard it
and I nestled into your warmth and stayed there
I came to know that you yourself are the world that fills my joy
searching for that fragrance, I wept, and wet my bed with tears

Unable to endure it, I asked, is this loneliness?
unable to bear it, I pushed the whole world away
I even sat thinking of hurting you, of making you weep
yet, hidden even from my own heart, it was brimming with love

A great, strange loneliness settled into my heart,
and with no one to tell it to, I wept
why did you go and leave me?
why did you go and leave me? I felt I could not bear to be apart

This is an honest hymn about the ache of feeling that God has gone away, the “dark night” that even faithful believers pass through. It opens without pretending: “a great, strange loneliness settled into my heart, and with no one to tell it to, I wept.” The cry it keeps returning to is the raw question of someone who feels abandoned, “why did you go and leave me?” This is prayer at its most vulnerable, admitting that God can feel absent.

But the loneliness is not the whole story. In the middle the memory of grace breaks through, “then, with such love, you spoke to me, and I heard it, and I nestled into your warmth.” The singer remembers that God had, in fact, come near, and that “you yourself are the world that fills my joy.” The tears now are of longing for that lost sense of nearness, weeping to find “that fragrance” of God’s presence again.

The most searching lines are the confession of how far the pain drove him, “unable to bear it, I pushed the whole world away,” and even “sat thinking of hurting you, of making you weep.” Anger and hurt at God are laid bare. Yet the hymn ends with a quiet, redeeming discovery: “hidden even from my own heart, it was brimming with love.” Underneath all the loneliness and resentment, love for God was there the whole time. What the listener is left with is the comfort that the feeling of God’s absence is not the loss of faith, and that beneath our darkest complaints, a real and abiding love can still be found.