Making Room and the Courage to Love

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

P. A. Ritzer, Volume 35

Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”

Those who so covet, who would rather have people killed than be inconvenienced, who demand that those who oppose their evil be implicated in it, those are the people who are bitter about large families, who resent them, who do not hide their judgment of and disdain for them. Large families have their stories of their experiences with such people. There are examples above.

Why do they resent large families? What does it matter to them how many children others bring into the world as long as the families take care of themselves and do not infringe on them? Could that resentment stem from a mixture of stinginess and regret? Mattias Desmet points out that people with meaningless jobs harbor “feelings of resentment and revenge toward those who have meaningful work.”^¹ Might that not be true of people who have contracepted—who have taken the meaning out of their relationships and closed them to life—toward those whose relationships are open to life and thus have profound meaning?

Could it be that large families put the lie to all the reasons they fornicated, contracepted, did not marry, constrained their love to minimize the number of their children, had abortions, demanded fewer people in the world and implicated others in all that evil? Could it be that they envy and resent the fullness of life that they see in large families that is lacking in their lives? Who are you to have all those kids when I had aborted my child or children, or had my tubes tied or had my vasectomy so that we did not have so many kids, so that we could afford all the things we wanted in life? Who are you to love into existence and raise all those kids, when I was afraid to do the same, afraid of what it would take from me, of what I would be required to give? Who are you to prove my stinginess wrong with your generous love? I remember my dad saying years ago, with deep sympathy, that he wondered if women thought about the children they had aborted when they lay all alone in nursing homes. May God grant them repentance and peace. On the other hand, I recently visited my nintey-five-year-old mother in her beautiful care facility, and her nurse from Ethiopia told me how wonderful it is that my mother gets so much attention from her children and grandchildren. The nurse is a mother of five.

The consideration of selfishness above brings to mind a recent experience we had at a hotel. It was a modest hotel in a small town with a commensurate breakfast accommodation in the lobby. My wife went down to get us coffee and tea and returned much later than expected. She complained that a woman took her time at the automatic coffee machine (hardly Starbucks) mixing various automatic coffees, blocking all other people from the machine, to achieve her ideal blend, as the line of frustrated guests behind her grew. My wife expressed to me her exasperation with the woman blocking all others and said that, had she allowed others to get in around her, they could have got their drinks as she concocted her composite brew. I observed that I doubted that the coffee-mixing lady was from a large family, as images emerged in my mind of my wife and her ten siblings and their family members merging supplely and happily in and out of food and drink offerings at family events. Of a different race and culture from my wife’s, the large family from which I hail is geared more toward the line-up-and-take-your-turn persuasion but all with the sense that one needs to move along and not take too much out of consideration for those with whom one is sharing the feast (and then go back later and load up again of whatever is left). I was perhaps in my teens when I first wondered at people who could walk four abreast in a hall or on a sidewalk, or stand in the way of everyone else in a narrow passage and not give way to others. It struck me then that they could not have grown up in a large family to be so oblivious to the needs of others, to the need to make room for others.

And that, right there, might be the great genius of large families: making room. Large families are blessed with an essential disposition, intuition, and capacity for making room. People in large families continually make room for others. They make room for the new baby who comes home with their mother from the hospital, for each other at the dinner table, for each other in the car, for each other in the pew. They know how to make room as well for the guest. This making room is a choice on the part of the parents. Out of that rolling, loving choice emerges a living reality for the parents and for the children, for whom it becomes a living norm exercised in a myriad of daily choices. Unlike Bill Maher, they are not afraid of running out of resources.

In all those choices, members of a family are not just making room for others in their physical surroundings. They are making room for them in their minds. And they are making room for them in their hearts. As one makes more room in one’s heart, one expands his capacity to love. If family members can make room and watch their house, table, car, and their minds and their hearts accommodate more people whom they love, they are not threatened by the idea of making room for more people to share this vast planet. They are not afraid that there are not enough resources because they have lived a life of sharing and doing with less when necessary.

And as a family member makes room for others, he is continually conditioned to think about how whatever he is doing right now affects others within the space he shares with them in the house, at the table, in the car, in his head, and in his heart. And he settles into his place among the others in his family, in the world, in the universe. He finds his place with others and the Other. Mattias Desmet puts that in a special perspective: “In a sense, all of life consists of an attempt to find space for oneself in the relationship with Others. . . . The more man advances in this process, the more energy and creative power he will have. . . . It is on this track that the future of humanity lies and not on the mechanistic-transhumanistic track.”²

And there, in considering the capacity of making room within a family, of finding one’s place in relationship to others, we touch upon the great fear that drives the overpopulation lie and the contraception lie and the abortion lie and the big lie of the entire culture of death. The great irony is that the very thing that people who peddle and buy those lies are seeking is the very thing that they are so afraid of. What else could scare people so much that they would murder their own children rather than accept it? Love. They fear love, the very thing that they are erroneously seeking.

So, the fear that drives the lies is the fear to love. Not the make-me-feel-good, get-all-I-can infatuation, but the real die-to-yourself, fully committed love. It is not about controlling or becoming the it for the other by whatever desperate means necessary, but about laying down one’s life for the other. It does not look like the metrosexual and the mini-dress babe on the endless fornication vacation but more like two red-eyed young parents tag teaming it through the night to care for a sick child their sacramental love brought into the world. And because of that true selfless, sacrificial nature of real love, the fear of it is not uncommon, whatever we may think. In fact, it is a fear that we must each face, acknowledge, and work to overcome. The culture of death is the result of our refusal to do so.

And so, to love requires courage. Everyone on earth seeks the benefits of love, but far too few of us have the courage to make room for love, to abandon ourselves to love. And yet, by courageously choosing love, one lovingly chooses courage: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”³ Ah, there is the antidote to the fear that drives the big lie of overpopulation and the culture of death of which it is a part. And thus that stepping-off-a-cliff kind of courage that can launch one into love is itself properly grounded in the love out of which all other love flows, the love of God. As I wrote in Love and the Art of Bookstore Book Signing:

Love is relational, requiring a lover, a beloved, and the love between them. ‘God is love’ (1 Jn 4:16). Thus God is relational, trinitarian: the Father giving himself to the Son, the Son giving Himself to the Father, the Holy Spirit being this exchange between the Father and the Son. Love is giving of the self. It is desiring the best for the other. It is especially manifested among humans in the Sacrament of Matrimony, the spouses giving themselves to each other in a way that brings forth new life, most dramatically in conception of children: trinitarian in the husband, the wife, and God present in the sacramental union; trinitarian in the husband, the wife, and the child conceived, brought forth, and educated. Human marriage is thus a type of the trinitarian life of God, as is the marriage of God and the Church. And marriage is fruitful, because love is ultimately fruitful in every good way.⁴

That true love, God’s love, has plenty of room; it knows no bounds; it is ever expansive, ever giving, never exhausted. It knows not the pernicious stinginess of the little false gods of control. It will go to the Cross and suffer ignominious subjection, torture, humiliation, and abandonment for its beloved. Most of us are not called to that extreme but are called to lesser acts of love in communion with that ultimate act. Mattias Desmet touches upon it whether knowingly or not:

To the degree that we can connect with what is outside ourselves, we are able to transcend our own boundaries and our own world of experience gets expanded to an existence that extends endlessly in time and space. Through resonance with the greater plain, we participate in the timelessness of the universe, like a reed rustling in the eternal air of life.⁵

And that professor of psychology asserts that it is when a child recognizes that his parents are not omniscient and omnipotent that the child is faced with a choice between “fear or creativity.” If the child chooses creativity it develops a “fledgling sensitivity” to “fiction and poetry,” and “a basis for its identity and principles about how to behave” and “the child finds, in stories and poetry, echoes and scents of the lost maternal paradise of its earliest months of life.” This “creation of individuality. . . . connects man with the Other and leads to resonance with (love) objects instead of psychological isolation and (self-) destructiveness.”⁶ Connecting with the Other looks like a good thing, psychologically. It looks a lot like love of God and love of neighbor, the greatest commandments that sum up all of God’s law.⁷

With the love of God comes faith and hope. Without the courage to love, and the faith, hope, and love it enables, desperate love-seeking degenerates into extramarital sexual relations, contraception, abortion, demanding there be fewer people on the earth, all of which leads to deeper and deeper selfishness, loneliness, disappointment, frustration, and despair that cannot imagine the freedom and fullness of love that meets the criterion that Jesus pronounced. The greatest love involves one laying down one’s life for his friends, one dying to oneself so as to live.⁸

The good news is that it is not too late to love if you are still alive on earth. We all fail at love in various ways and to varying degrees; thus sin. But until we die, we can do something about it. We can repent and give ourselves over to love. If you do not believe that God can love you due to your sins, read the passion narratives in the gospels, or meditate on a crucifix, and ask yourself if the God who would do that for you does not love you enough to forgive whatever you bring to Him in repentance. For those who have given themselves over to the culture of death in contraception, abortion, extramarital sex, population control, etc., conversion can propel you out of the culture of death to life. Liberate yourself from the side of fear, despair, hate, murder, destruction, selfishness, and control and join the side of faith, hope, and above all, love. All of us must continually repent of our failures to love. Christianity offers a profound opportunity for that conversion, especially in the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the Catholic Church where forgiveness is sacramentalized.

And in that vein, this sinner has hope for conversion in so many people throughout the earth. Take an example like Russell Brand who famously speaks of his former life of hedonism and who now very publicly shares his ongoing conversion to Christianity. I see conversion in so many of the folks mentioned above: Tucker Carlson, Mattias Desmet, Roseanne Barr, Calley and Casey Means, Nicole Shanahan, Robert Kennedy, Jr. I suspect that Elon Musk may be heading into it. And I have hope for Bill Maher. In fact, I do not see how much longer Maher’s intelligence and honesty can accommodate atheistic liberalism, though I do hope that he does not wait until it is too late. The thing about us believers in the God of love is that we pray for, and invite, and are ever eager for others to join us in that love, even and especially our enemies. It will not yet be perfect love because we are all still sinners in this fallen world, but it will be true love with the promise of perfection in eternal life when we all hope to live in the very life of God. No matter who you are or what you have done, we would love to have you join us.

God bless.

Thank you.

P. A. Ritzer

Please like, share, restack or comment.

Again, thanks.

©2025 P. A. Ritzer

1. Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2022), 30.

2. Ibid., 182.

3. 1 John 4:18, Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, RSV, Second Catholic Edition (2010).

4. P. A. Ritzer, Love and the Art of Bookstore Book Signing (Aurora, CO: Seven Ox Press, 2012 ), 24.

5. Desmet, Psychology, 186

6. Ibid., 82-83.

7. Matt 22:37-40 (Ignatius).

8. Jn 15:13, Lk 9:23-24 (Ignatius).