In the troparion for today’s feast, we sing that God has “established the holy fathers as lights on the earth” and that “through them” he has “guided us to the true faith.” These troparia remind us of the Lord’s constant providential activity in creation: he truly guides us and cares for us in accord with his inscrutable saving economy, giving us overseers and teachers and leading us always toward the good. Our heavenly Father is not a divine watchmaker: nature and its laws are not something he has wound up and then lets go to work of their own accord. He is rather the one in whom we live and move and have our being, the one who is everywhere present and filling all things, the one who is totally transcendent and utterly immanent. Indeed, according to the fathers, if God were to cease his active care for creation—including the angelic creation!—it would immediately lapse into non-being and corruption.
Therefore, as we go through our days, let us never consign God exclusively to some distant place in a next life and other world: he is living and working in our midst always, even unto the end of the age, and he is near at hand in the day when we call upon him—nearer even than our own breath or our own thoughts. His love and care, which extend even to the lowliest sparrow, extend all the more to us. To paraphrase St. Simeon the New Theologian, he is always present to us, but we are not always present to him. Therefore let us cultivate the constant remembrance of his holy presence and learn to rely on him in every circumstance of our life, every moment great and small, for our good Lord numbers even the hairs of our head.