Love: a matter of • \Ting and giving

LAST WEEK'S letters about Karen Armstrong were at pains to dismiss not to understand, to belittle, or condemn and attribute guilt to a person, to excuse, defend and praise a system. Empathy, i.e. insight and feeling, for Karen was notable for its absence, and Fr Whitty provided a fitting conclusion which summed up the lack of love.
The inference is that the writers have experienced little love themselves. In order to live and love the human person must first receive love. A baby shown no love fails to respond and can even die.
The whole problem is that the world was designed by God to run on empathy and man substituted duty. Duty directs attention to a fixed, disincarnated code which comes not as a person but in the form of a book or words imposed • REGARDING "Convent Girls", April 5, as someone who went to the same Birmingham Convent (from aged 4 to 17) as Karen Armstrong and followed her to Oxford some years later, I was distressed by the rather slanted picture given by that article. My sister and I have quite different memories; we from without.
It diverts people away from attention to persons and fellowfeeling to ideas presented in the abstract. Duty is cold as charity, "logical", non-feeling. Ignoring fellow-feeling, it hardens the heart and closes the mind.
God's plan for the world was love-in-person, empathy, fellowfeeling written in, not a disembodied, depersonalised set of duties superimposed on human nature. The basic order of the universe is intrinsic to it, the true human order is written in to the real human person, incarnated. This fundamental order is entirely dependent on empathy. Without insight and fellow-feeling, a man or woman is non-human.
Ruth Clancy 9, Ilan Lane, Manchester M23 8AQ
both greatly enjoyed our time at the school which gave us a happy and balanced start in life.
My regret is that I did not receive more formal grounding in my faith to equip me for later years.
Jane MacHale 21, Greencroft Gdns, London NW6 3LN