Maramon: The 121st edition of the Maramon Convention, the annual retreat of the Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian Church, started on the banks of the Pampa River with a call to do away with the impurities clogging the environment as well as human minds.
Dr Joseph Mar Thoma Metropolitan, the supreme head of the church, said environmental pollution was the biggest threat faced by mankind. Our minds were also being polluted along with the environment we live in, he said, while inaugurating the week-long event on Sunday.
He lamented the recurring incidents of character assassination and the unhealthy trends that plague the political, social and religious fields. He exhorted the entire civil society to strive for the clean-up of the system.
A Christian had a responsibility to stand testimony to Christ, he said, adding that the believers could discharge their duties by working for the purification of minds. He said the Church could experience the blessings of the gospels and witness the human face of god through these attempts.
Let the Maramon Convention contribute to the transformation of society into a tolerant one, he wished aloud.
He reminisced the late Zacharias Mar Theophilus’s contribution to the Church and society as a whole as the suffragan metropolitan.
Dr Philipose Mar Chrysostom Mar Thoma Metropolitan started the prayers. Mar Thoma Evangelistic Association president Dr Thomas Mar Thimotheus presided over the function.
The 101-member choir of the Church’s Department of Sacred Music and Communication presented the flock gathered on the sand bank with a musical treat.
Rev Malcolm Tan from Singapore and Dr Anne Mathews also spoke on the occasion. Mathews’s grandfather E Stanley Jones was a keynote speaker at the convention for 45 years.
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