How much risk is reality?  I ask because I recently read yet another article about the famous high wall climber, Alex Honnold.  Honnold has made his name by scaling enormous walls, some three thousand feet high, alone and without using any ropes whatsoever. Some call him foolish, others crazy.  Still others admire his penchant for risk and adventure (and he is not the only rock climber who engages in such things).  Honnold has attracted a significant following.  As he put it in the article, "I have a gift" for dealing with high pressures situations in a calm and reasoned way.
     For Honnold, reality is a high risk activity.  He puts his life on the line every time he stands at the foot of a rock face.  For the rest of us, however, reality also is a risk.  It is a risk because reality is so frightfully unpredictable and contingent.  We frequently make decisions whose outcome we cannot precisely anticipate or fathom, and we almost every day engage in activities which, though they seem reasonable and wonderful at the time, can just as easily descend into a morass of confusion, even darkness and despair.  We can't tame reality fully, and that is why, despite everything we know about it, reality remains a profound mystery.
     And mysteries carry risk.  On the other hand, if life had no mystery, though it might be safer, it would also be immeasurably less interesting.  It wouldn't have a heart.  We're not made to pursue what we can clearly see and know.  We're made to seek that which we do not.  Whether you believe this reality dances before a thin veil of the supernatural or it dances with itself and itself only, you understand that to be human is to engage in quest, a quest for hope, a quest for meaning.
     Life is the greatest--and grandest--risk of all.  This is even truer if there is a God, for then risk assumes the more profound challenge of all:  faith.  Yet to paraphrase Honnold, faith is not a risk without reason, but a risk which, all things considered, is the most reasonable of all.