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OAKTON EGL 102 - Ministry of Loop Holes

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Otto 1 Allison Dell OttoC. BustamanteENG 102-01014 September 2008Ministry of Loop HolesIt was rainy and awful on the morning of my interview with Reverend Gregory Dell. I'd been in the car driving at a painstakingly slow pace in traffic down Western Avenue for almost anhour before I finally reached Reverend Dell's Logan Square apartment. The weather and the leak in my car's sun roof had delivered me to this appointment cold, tired, and crabby. I tried to regainmy good spirits as I walked up to his door with my video camera and note pad. I rang the doorbell and waited, rain lightly falling with little taps on my jacket and hair. I saw a familiar figure walk up behind the foggy glass of the door and open it. Greg appeared, wearing a dark button up shirt with a pen in the breast pocket, jeans, sneakers, and glasses. He is a short and stocky man of 62. He is bald, except for two fuzzy patches of salt and pepper hair on either side of his head that match his beard. His big nose and ears are endearing, and although perhaps not classically so, he is handsome. “Hi Uncle Greg,” I said with the little smile that I could muster up. He greeted me with a hug. “Hey Al.” Reverend Greg Dell is my mother's older brother. He is a recently retired minister who served in the Methodist Church and whose career was marked and made famous by a year-long suspension for performing marriages for gay and lesbian couples after the church had banned them. When it came time to choose a subject for this report, he immediately came to mind. He's certainly an expert on religion, with a career in the churchOtto 2 spanning almost 40 years. And I've been interested, especially as I get older and gain a better understanding of organized religion's effects on our world, in my uncle's ideas about the church. As I entered his apartment with it's smells and sights already well known to me, I took off my soaking wet sneakers. I was already eager to ask my questions. My uncle is a remarkable storyteller and I could feel that I was about to learn things that I had not known before. What wasGreg's view of organized religion and how much had it changed considering everything he's beenthrough?I walked down the hallway that stretches across the entire apartment towards the living room. The walls are lined with photo collages. Pouring over those photos one by one has always been one of my favorite things to do when we go over to my uncle and aunt's house. There are pictures of my brothers and me when we were babies, pictures of my Uncle Greg and Aunt Jade throughout the decades of their relationship, my cousins and some newer ones of my cousins' kids, my uncle, my mom, and their sister when they were little, and even some photos of my grandparents when they were young. Those walls contain my family history and they feel so full of stories and life to me. One of my favorite features in this photograph collection are Greg's mug shots, which were taking during his participation in the Civil Rights movement. We sat in the living room. Greg was quieter than usual and had already informed me that he's having a bad day. He was forced to retire early a couple of years ago when he was diagnosedwith Parkinson's Disease and had to go on disability. Over the last two years, we've seen some ofhis trademark spark and vivaciousness fade, and his symptoms are irregular, with good days and bad days. On the day of our interview, as I set up my camera and he got situated in the comfyOtto 3 couch with the floral pattern, he wasn't stuttering or shaking but I could tell he was not feeling well. Once my camera was set up and ready to go, I seated myself in a chair across the coffee table from my uncle, reviewed with him the purpose of our interview, and got started with my questions. An advantage of interviewing someone in my close family is that I was already privy to a lot of our family's recent history. Greg was born in Blue Island, Illinois in December of 1945 to my grandparents Tony and Jeanette Dell. My grandfather was the first of our family to be born inthe United States after my relatives moved here from Italy. In an effort to “de-Italianize”, Tony changed his name (he was born Antonio Delbaccio), dropped the Italian language, and, most relevant to this story, left the Roman Catholic church. However, the “true American family” still were church-goers in the 1950s, so when the family was moved from Blue Island to Midlothian, Illinois, they were eager to join a neighborhood congregation. I never learned from my mother how my family ended up in the Methodist church, and when I asked my uncle, he smiled at how unintentional the choice was. The church down the block from their house was a Methodist church, so the Methodist church it was.When I asked Greg how he decided to become a minister, I was surprised at how early the thought first occurred to him. When he was in seventh grade, his church's pastor suggested ministry to him because of his leadership and public speaking skills. In high school, my uncle was heavily involved in Boy Scouts, acquiring the prestigious rank of Eagle Scout. He was also passionately involved in the Civil Rights movement. But the solidification of his career choice came when he attended a march led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. “I saw a lot of hatred that wasOtto 4 covered up by peoples' nice smiles,” he told me. He recalled turning to one of his friends and announcing, “the Boy Scouts will never be a justice organization.” The practicality of this choicewas fully transformed into a choice of passion when, at the age of 22, Greg was devastated by the hatred and cruelty of Dr. King's assassination. I asked Greg what his initial feelings were about organized religion, back then when he first decided to become a minister. He put his hands up on his head. It's a habit of my uncle's to run his fingers along his scalp while he's talking and he'll occasionally raise them off his head to gesture about a point he's making. His finger nails are kept short and he sports a gold wedding ring and always, always wears a watch. He responded that his feelings were “mixed on the positive side”. “I tended to look on the institutional church as either being a benign force in society that was pretty irrelevant to where most people were, or a positive force that provided fertile ground for the civil rights movement, for the suffragette movement, and for the abolitionist movement.” And so, eager to


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OAKTON EGL 102 - Ministry of Loop Holes

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