"Such love does the sky now pour..."

Such love does the sky now pour
That whenever I stand in a field
I have to wring out the light when I get home.
- St. Francis of Assisi

    What a tremendous image and beautiful sentiment Saint Francis gives us!   Indeed, the mystics often regale us with such imagery and sentiment, too beautiful even to be believed at times.  Yet they intend us to believe them, for theirs is not an imaginative hope with which they console themselves a la Freudian wish fulfillment.  Rather, their imagery and sentiment arise out of a direct experience of the sacred nature of existence and The Holy One that is its source.  No, theirs is no wishful thinking but an honest report - sometimes invitation - of and into the reality of Being.
    But we doubt our beloved mystics, or explain them away (Modern psychology is a great tool for this: "To those that hold hammers everything looks like a nail," and all that...), or simply ignore them because theirs is not our experience and for what one has no reference point, one will have no ear (or vision, as the case may be.)   Jesus said this very thing, as reported in saying 113 of ​The Gospel of Thomas:

    His disciples said to him:  "When will the kingdom come?"   [And Jesus said,] "It will not come by watching for it.  People will not say: 'Look, here it is,' or 'Look, there it is.'  Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out over the earth and people do not see it."

    The great Hindu mystic Shankara said something very similar when he spoke of a rope mistaken for a snake, regarding his teaching of adhyasa (fundamentally meaning misperception due to past conditioning).  In short, taught Shankara, ignorance gives rise to skewed perception which in turn causes one to misperceive reality.  That is, we live in a world of illusion and, returning to the application of this fact to Saint Francis, fail to see the love that the sky pours down. 
    What if one wanted to know for oneself the truth of Saint Francis (or Jesus', or Shankara's) words?  What if one wanted this experience as one's very own?  Then what?
    All that is needed is a shift of attention and enough trust to surrender.  That is, one simply needs to direct one's attention away from one's thoughts, one's feelings, and one's sensations; become internally silent - then surrender to the moment.  When one does this, perception corrects itself and one sees the reality of Being; the sacred nature of existence and The Holy One that is its source.  Is this a struggle?  If so, consider taking on the practice of silence...
    shhhhhh...
    "Be still and know..."