Like cavities in teeth? Right, the kind of cavities for which you go to a dentist. Except, the dentist I have in mind, Richard Lyon, is more apt to deal with cavities not as your root problem but as a symptom of a more radical pathology. Dr. Lyon is into everything dontic, orthodontic, prosthodontic, indeed everything oral that afflicts that part of the human anatomy -- and the human psyche. It is not incidental that he began his medical career primarily as an anesthesiologist on hopsital staffs, which in turn grew out of his years as a corpsman in the US Navy. When he did enter dentistry fulltime he brought with him the technology, the trauma control, the organizational skills of the operating room, all of which is still evident in his unique dental clinic in Alton, Illinois. One of the things he is best known for within the profession is an invention called "Gemini II," which years ago replaced costly gold for dental restorations with a superior, non-precious alloy. To accomplish that he had to detour for awhile into the study of metallurgy. Because of this special expertise, and others, he has spent a good bit of his time flying hither and yon (sometimes with him at the controls of his own plane) lecturing to dental schools and societies in this country and abroad. Along the way he has established and maintained a dental clinic in the jungles of Guatemala, a clinic for folks in a black ghetto, and a sheltered workshop for the handicapped. But yes, he does do cavities -- all the way down.

In more recent years Lyon has added to his healing repertoire another kind of cavity. Or is it another dimension of the same cavity? I speak of that hollowness in human lives called sin and its twin, God-forsakenness. Dentist Lyon has become Pastor Lyon, an ordained minister in the church of Jesus Christ, not in place of his vocation as a dentist but in intimate combination with it. Both halves of his bi-vocational ministry, the dental as well as the transcendental, cross-pollenate -- Cross-pollenate, as in

Crossing. As proof, read the meditation which follows this article, entitled "R Is For Real." But first, allow me a short paragraph or two on how Richard L. Lyon, DDS and Fellow in the Academy of General Dentistry, became as well The Reverend Richard L. Lyon, M. Div. and D. Min., a Crossing all its own.

At age 55 Lyon felt the itch to liberalize his education beyond the sciences. Example: why during those years was the Middle East, specifically the tiny people of Israel, so influential as to send the biggest world-powers into political paroxysms with some backwater incident which ordinarily wouldn't have made it onto our local newspaper's page twelve? As a lifelong Presbyterian, Lyon had long heard of the people of Israel though not enough to answer his deeper questions about them, and through them about ourselves -- and God. So he enrolled in an Eden Seminary course on the Old Testament with one of its best interpreters, Walter Brueggemann, who in turn directed him to Christ Seminary - Seminex. When Seminex moved to Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, Lyon came along. He had come this far on what he later called his "road to Damascus." Why not, as he tried to explain to his longsuffering wife Dorothy and his incredulous staff at the clinic, go all the way? By 1985, just a month shy of age 60, he was graduated from LSTC as a Master of Divinity. Not long after, he was ordained and is now a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. As the preacher at his ordination I remember quipping, "You folks