In ‘Task,’ Faith Is Defined by Doubts—and Doubters

​

In the premiere episode of HBO’s Task—a cat-and-mouse series about sins, forgiveness, and the [extremely Delco accent] holiness of Rita’s wooder ice—two former colleagues reminisce about some silly old glory days, as former colleagues are wont to do. What distinguishes these two men, though, is that their workspace was also a house of God. 

“Remember when the football team won the conference title, and then they stormed the basilica, and they picked Peter up on their shoulders?” laughs Tom Brandis, a former priest turned FBI agent played by Mark Ruffalo. Which reminds the other man, a still-active priest named Father Daniel who is scheduled to perform four baptisms the next day: “Speaking of Peter! He just published a piece in the National Catholic Register on Rohr and The Universal Christ. I emailed it to you.”

Like the moody and surprising 2021 series Mare of Easttown before it, Task was written and produced for HBO by showrunner Brad Ingelsby, and the shows have much in common, right down to their conspicuous proximity to Fluffya.Both Mare and Task go heavy on the regional signifiers: rusting truss bridges, Yuengling beers, a vast parochial school circuit, that aforementioned sweet, sweet Rita’s. But Ingelsby is also intimately concerned with the opposite of the hyperlocal, exploring spaces that are more boundless and existential: like faith, redemption, unselfish love, and not just whether God exists but where. And at the intersection of all these interests is a man whose work has become both personally and professionally meaningful to the Task creator in recent years: Rohr.

Father Richard Rohr is an 82-year-old Franciscan friar who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a speaker and podcaster and the author of dozens of books with titles like Falling Upward and Radical Grace and The Universal Christ—which argues that Jesus the man and Christ the cosmic spirit are not actually one and the same. Rohr’s philosophies sometimes dovetail with, but often challenge, the official doctrines of the Catholic Church. To some, this makes Rohr extra appealing. To others, he’s a threat.For Ingelsby, who was first introduced to Rohr’s work by a dear family member, Rohr is a font of inquiry and inspiration, one he’s drawn upon in both of his HBO projects and also in his own life.

But to Task’sTom Brandis—who is a lapsed believer, a grieving widower, a watchful birder, and a weary father—Rohr is just another matter of faith to scoff at, one more set of answers to question. “Let me guess,” Tom says to Father Daniel, sounding a little bit like an over-it Will Hunting roasting that ponytailed Harvard student. “Rohr’s up to his old tricks, trying to convince us all that Christ is in everything. He’s even in this table here!” Tom knocks on wood a couple of times for good measure. “Hello? Christ? Hello?” 

Silence. 

“Oh, he must be taking a crap,” Tom jokes, now just taking things too far. Once a man of the cloth, he’s now deep in his cups, lost trying to get to the bottom of it all. As Task unfolds, everything he’s been burying surfaces.

“My interest in these writers comes from my uncle Ed,” Ingelsby tells me in a recent Zoom conversation, explaining why he chose to reference Rohr (as well as some other unorthodox thinkers, like the Trappist monk Thomas Merton) in both Task and Mare. In fact, a lot of the interesting things in Task come from Ingelsby’s uncle Ed Hastings.“He was an Augustinian priest for 20-plus years, and then he left the priesthood to marry a woman,” Ingelsby says. “He’s the one that introduced me to Richard Rohr. My introduction, and really my association, with [Rohr] is The Universal Christ. That was the book that came to me.”

If it isn’t clear by now, Rohr has never really been your run-of-the-mill theologian. He teaches about prophets and blessings and having mercy, sure, but he’s also a guy who would be thrilled to explain the link between Enneagram personality tests and some esoteric fourth-century Christian mystics called the Desert Fathers. Some of his biggest influences include Carl Jung and Merton, a Catholic convert and interfaith enthusiast who loved nothing more than to nerd out over Zen Buddhism. Rohr merrily rejects the “dualism” of viewing the world in terms of good or evil, heaven or hell. (And speaking of hell: He’s unmoved and unconvinced by the concept of eternal damnation.) To Rohr, God doesn’t dwell somewhere up there,far away in an inaccessible dimension. God is here,now, in the smallest moments of awareness and connection, and anyone can say hello. Many of these tenets are a marked departure from the Catholic Church, yet Rohr backs up his beliefs by quoting deftly and proudly from the Bible. 

All of this definitely gets people’s attention. Rohr’s critics say fretful things like: “He seems to spend all of his time and energies sucking faithful Catholics well outside of the heart of the Church in down a path of spiritual destruction.” But a lot of soul-searchers are intrigued by the message, including U2 frontman Bono, love-thyself doyennes Brené Brown and Oprah, and the late Pope Francis, who in a 2022 visit with Rohr told him he’d already read The Universal Christ and to keep on keepin’ on, brother. (I’m only slightly paraphrasing.) 

And, of course, Ed.

Like Ingelsby’s father, Ed played basketball at Villanova. He wasn’t the only member of the clergy in Ingelsby’s family, but he had a different approach to religious discussion compared to some of the older guard. “My great-uncle was a priest, real by the book,” Ingelsby says, going on to imitate him: “‘This is what God said. This is what we do. Looking at this Bible passage says this. Brad, why are you interpreting it differently? It says this.’And my uncle Ed was not like that. He was open to interpretation.” 

Task is one of multiple Ingelsby projects to be enriched by Rohr’s work. Back in 2021, following the release of the Mare of Easttown finale, “Sacraments,” Ingelsby told British GQ: “I was reading Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, who has this idea about God not being a person up in the sky, [but] that God is essentially love and then any example of love in our life is really God.” Rohr’s name isn’t spoken directly in Mare,but Merton’s is, in the very first episode. 

Mare’s mother, Helen (Jean Smart), tells Mare’s cousin, a local priest, about a gal she knows who is going through some shit and “wondering where the hell God is in her life.” Seizing the opportunity, Father Dan Hastings clears his throat:

Father Dan: Depends on what her view of God is. Merton says that “our idea of God” tells us more about ourselves than about—

Helen: When you’re up at the altar preaching to the congregation, you ever get the feeling no one’s listening?

Father Dan: Every single day.

Merton’s principles are a big element of Rohr’s canon; one of Rohr’s books, 2011’s Falling Upward, frequently quotes Merton’s writing and concludes with a close reading of one of his poems. In that book, Rohr’s focus is on the Jungian idea that a person’s life is divided into two stages. Each stage, he explains, has its own fundamental … task:

There is much evidence on several levels that there are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The first task we take for granted as the very purpose of life, which does not mean we do it well. The second task, I am told, is more encountered than sought; few arrive at it with much preplanning, purpose, or passion. 

It’s easy to see Tom in this passage, stuck in existential dysfunction between his life’s two assignments, the container he spent so much time and care building having crumbled. When I ask Ingelsby whether the name of his series is a nod to Falling Upward, he says he did read the book, but “it wasn’t, like, why we called the show Task. I can be honest about that.” 

As he sees it, Task’smore essential theme is the one explored in The Universal Christ: how people perceive—and pursue their idea of—God. 

Like Ingelsby, I was raised in a religious family and, for a time, attended Catholic school. (A core 1995 memory is our seventh-grade religion teacher, Sister Butler, telling us: “Persecution is Jesus. Prosecution is Marcia Clark.”) My dad, one of eight kids, grew up in a neighborhood in Yonkers where the Irish were so Catholic they practically turned into Italians, exclaiming “Madone!” in the manner of a Soprano to invoke the Virgin Mary. My great-aunt Gigi, on the other side of the family, was a nun in Wisconsin; when I got into college, she sent me a letter saying she had prayed for my admission. (I’ve always wondered how much more oomph her requests had with the man upstairs than, say, my mother’s did.) 

Church every Sunday was completely nonnegotiable in my family, even on vacation. I didn’t have to attend at 7 a.m., like Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel) complains about in Task, but I do remember being annoyed that we always had to leave the house right in the middle of Ren & Stimpy to get to the 11:30 Mass at St. James. Like Grasso, I questioned the many rules and regulations of Catholicism. Some just seemed conflicting: If God will forgive my sins anyway, why can’t I just eat meat on Friday, Mom?Others felt too big to reckon with: What about my friends whose families don’t go to church? Am I to believe they’ll automatically go straight to hell? 

Ingelsby says that some of the similar questions Grasso asks in Task, big and small,were derived from ones he’s asked throughout his life. “One of the issues I’ve had with the church over the years,” he says, “is that at times it feels quite exclusive. I am the way, the truth, the life—there’s only one way in. Well, that’s not what I want that to feel like, you know?” As he’s explored works like The Universal Christ,he says what he really responded to “was that idea of sort of opening the doors. And the idea of Christ not being so narrow, and also inclusive of so many other people outside of the Catholic Church.”

As he thought about the character of Tom in Task, “I imagined him quite like my uncle,” says Ingelsby, “whom I found was a very inclusive and progressive priest.” Ruffalo’s own jumbled, interfaith background enabled him to bring a useful perspective to the role, too. On the We’re Not Kidding podcast, Ruffalo explained that between his parents, grandparents, and extended family, he was exposed to (a) Catholic Italians, (b) Jimmy Swaggart–core evangelical Christians, and (c) members of the Baha’i Faith, a 19th-century universalist religion with Iranian origins. It was that last one, Ruffalo said, “that resonated with me the most and felt the most honest and the least hypocritical.”

In Episode 6 of Task, Grasso questions Tom about the point of confession. “God don’t seem like someone who forgets,” Grasso points out. 

“Confession’s for humans,” Tom answers. “It’s a human practice to help us deal with the shame.” 

In the finale, Grasso lies in a hospital bed, his life disgraced and saved all at once. “Aren’t you going to give me my penance?” he asks Tom. In an interview with Esquire, Ingelsby said that he once asked Ed what it was like to be a priest in a parish and hear people’s confessions. “He said: ‘You wouldn’t believe the shame that people felt,’” Ingelsby recalled. “That’s actually where I got [Tom’s] line. He said: ‘I never gave penance. Because people were beating themselves up on their own so much.’”  

In Task, Tom and Grasso each have a litany of big issues with the church. But then there’s their adversary, Robbie (Tom Pelphrey), who has no such ledger—because he doesn’t think about church at all. A doomed garbageman with kind eyes, cute kids, a murdered brother, and a life of crime that’s spiraling out of control, Robbie disagrees when his friend Cliff describes him as “a monk” early in the series. “Monks pray,” he mutters.

But while Robbie has never had any time for God, there are signs that he does have sacred rituals all his own, even if he lacks the ecclesiastic vocabulary to see them that way. “I was always really just interested in Robbie having a slightly different spirituality than Tom,” says Ingelsby. “I always thought Robbie had his own—I felt like there was a sense of wonder.” 

When Robbie splashes his shoulders with cold water before jumping all the way into the quarry so that his heart won’t explode, a practice taught to him by his late brother, it looks a lot like an anointment. Those brochures about Canadian Narnia that Robbie filled the decoy duffel bag with in lieu of cash? They reminded me of religious pamphlets promising heaven. “When he’s out in that quarry, and when he’s looking up, he feels something else,” Ingelsby says. “Now, it may not be our definition of God. It may not be the Catholic version of God. But he feels something spiritual going on.”

It isn’t until the fifth episode of Task that Robbie and Tom finally cross paths, the former kidnapping the latter and forcing him to drive at gunpoint. Their conversation is worth the wait. Robbie bristles at organized religion and initially clowns on Tom’s parable about vagrant birds who have strayed from home. Still, he does have a question about some holy sacraments. “You seen people die, doing last rites and all?” Robbie asks. “In the final moments, are they scared?” Yes, Tom answers: every one. The quiet truth of Task is that faith won’t take away your fear. What it can do is make sure you don’t face it alone. The next time Robbie and Tom are in a car together, in Episode 6, the former is in the latter’s arms, bleeding out from a stab wound. As Robbie dies, his mind’s eye turns to his family, and also to his quarry.

I ask Ingelsby about the title of the Task finale, “A Still Small Voice,” which is a line found in the Bible, in the book of 1 Kings. In the passage, God reveals himself to a man named Elijah, but not in the bombastic way Elijah’s expecting. 

The Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:
And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

Rohr’s most recent book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage,has a chapter about Elijah. But Ingelsby says that, as ever, it was his uncle who not only led him to the phrase “a still small voice” but also told him a story that deepened its resonance. 

“I asked him: Why did you become a priest? What was that moment? What was the feeling?” he recalls. “And he mentioned that quote to me, like: ‘It wasn’t some bolt of lightning hitting me at some moment. There wasn’t some, you know, some image or epiphany. It was just this constant voice, this very, very quiet but constant voice inside me that was pushing me in that direction. And I wanted to get closer to the source.’

“And what I always imagined,” Ingelsby continues, “was that Tom heard the voice, but over time, it’s diminished. It’s diminished and diminished, and it’s almost inaudible now.” Indeed, in the midseason episode “All Roads,” Grasso asks Tom why he became a priest, and Tom answers: “Um, it was a feeling, I guess. That there was something beyond me, and I wanted to get closer to the source of it. But the longer I stayed, the further away I felt.”

It’s been too long since I’ve been to Mass. I didn’t turn into what they call a “lapsed Catholic” (or one of the “nones,” a term I learned from a 2020 New Yorker feature on Rohr) out of any conscious stand or stubborn decision. Quite the opposite: I just … drifted, until one day I couldn’t remember the last time I’d set foot on shore. But there are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see, as, uh, Jordan Peterson once tweeted from an airplane while watching sunlight dance across an Evian bottle. (Look, we don’t always get to choose the Lord’s messenger, man.) And ever since I started working on this article—reading more Rohr, parsing Ingelsby’s scripts, imagining Merton chopping it up with the Dalai Lama, trying to understand my view of God—my spiritual vision feels just a little bit clearer, if not necessarily any more Catholic.  

I also keep noticing odd little connections to Task in my life. When the Jenny Lewis song “Born Secular” came up on shuffle the other day, I actually listened to the lyrics—God goes where he wants / And who knows where he is not / Not in meeeeeeee,she laments; God works in mysterious ways / And God gives and then he takes / From meeeeeee—and thought: This is basically Robbie’s song. “I never once felt God in my life,” he tells Tom in Episode 5. “And I think people wanna believe that there’s more than this ’cause if this is really all there is … then that’s too fuckin’ depressing.” 

When I looked up the wordy title of Task’s penultimate episode, “Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing, There Is a River,” I saw it was adapted from the work of Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.

And reading that, I thought: Huh, why does that sound ever so slightly familiar? And then I remembered the piece of writing I’d come across a few days earlier, from the newly minted Nobel Prize–winning writer László Krasznahorkai of Hungary, and how its bracing clarity had made me feel: like I’d just jumped into a cold quarry with no acclimatization. Like my heart just might explode.

Just for kicks, I decided to check out Rohr’s opinion on myEnneagram number. Yet again, what I found delivered me right back to Task. “For the soul, nothing is more humiliating than to see the phoniness of your love,” Rohr noted in an old lecture about us type twos. “You want to cry: ‘Oh, damn it, I thought I was being so good,’” he continued, in a mock tone of anguish. ‘But I wasn’t being good to you at all. I was being good to me.’ Oh, that’s painful!” 

It’s painful, indeed—and it’s pretty much the same wake-up call that Tom receives from Father Daniel during the closing minutes of the Task finale. Seeking advice about whether to place the orphaned child Sam with a nice foster family or keep hosting Sam himself, Tom is surprised when Father Daniel suggests that he might not be in the right place in life to meet the kid’s needs. 

“Here I was, thinking I’d done a good thing,” Tom mutters. 

“You have done a good thing,” the priest allows. “But have you done that good thing for the boy, or for yourself?” 

Reflecting on the conversation, Ingelsby remarks: “There was a lot of Merton in that last speech.” And he notes that Tom’s ultimate choice to set Sam on a new path was maybe a little bit of an olive branch between Tom and God. “It wasn’t that Tom was going back into the church, or kneeling at the altar, or saying Mass,” Ingelsby says. But in saying goodbye to Sam, Tom made a decision that wasn’t dominated by self-involved fear. “That, to me, was the act of faith at the end.” 

Tom’s decision about Sam is made quietly. Other than his talk with Father Daniel, we don’t hear him explain himself. But in another wrenching key moment from “A Still Small Voice,” Tom’s ongoing transformation is proud and public. All season, we’ve wondered what Tom will say at the sentencing of his adopted son, Ethan, who killed Tom’s wife when he pushed her down the stairs while experiencing auditory hallucinations. When Tom finally speaks, you can hear a pin drop. 

“Ethan, I don’t want you to live with the shame anymore,” he says. “I forgive you. I love you. I’m not here today to tell the court when my son should be released; that’s not up to me. I’m here today to let you know that when that day comes, I’ll be ready. Come straight home. I’ll be there waiting for you.” Once I stopped weeping at Ruffalo’s delivery, I reflected on a scene back in the second episode of Mare of Easttown in which a deacon is giving a sermon. He tells of a time he froze up upon being confronted by a grieving, raging widow who challenged him to defend his God. If he could have a do-over, he says, he knows just what he would do: “I would sit down beside her and say, simply, I’m here.” 

In the final shot of Task—or perhaps just the final shot of Task’s first season, Ingelsby has hoped and hinted—Tom sits on an upstairs bed stripped of its sheets, staring into the middle distance. The room looks a lot like a rectory, really: bare walls, swept floor, nothing to see here except what’s out the window. Sam has gone to his new home, where, inshallah, he will decorate his new walls and find his source of wonder and maybe one day feel safe enough to begin, in earnest, that first task of creating the proper container to carry the rest of his life. 

Tom, though, remains, and his gaze settles on the garden where, earlier in the finale, he’d knelt in the soil next to Sam and summoned God. Not with performative prayer, not in righteous anger, but via some practical teaching about harvesting vegetables. “See how it has a root sticking out of the ground? That’s what we’re looking for,” Tom had said to Sam. “Make a fist. Let’s see. So, that’s about the perfect size for a beet.” Based on my idea of God, this might as well be scripture. 

In August, the Center for Action and Contemplation shared a podcast that was recorded at Rohr’s hermitage in New Mexico in which the friar spoke about his writing on Elijah. One host asked him how to be able to hear that “still small voice” that signifies God’s presence. “You lower the threshold of beauty,” Rohr said. “Little tiny things; little quiet things teach you, impress you, draw your attention.

“I experience it here on my front porch,” he added, “where, on a Sunday afternoon, no one’s around here. Just watching nothing. It takes less and less to make me happy, completely happy. It’s the still small voice. When you’re young, you’re looking for miracles and apparitions, at least if you’re a Catholic. You’re looking for something showy. I don’t expect that. I don’t think I even need or want that.” 

Outside Tom’s window: a gentle breeze and birdsong.On Tom’s face: something that looks like peace. At the end of our conversation, I ask Ingelsby about a shot from the episode where Tom is shown praying over what to do with Sam. Was this another instance where he sought “some kind of guidance” and got only silence in return? Or did Ingelsby think that maybe this time, Tom’s prayer was answered?

“I never thought he got, like, an answer from God,” Ingelsby says. “I always felt like, in that moment, it was Daniel, it was his wife, it was that sense of, maybe, his own experiences. … I guess when I wrote it, I felt like he didn’t need to hear from God. He knew what to do, in a way.” No miracles, no apparitions, nothing showy. 

“He’d armed himself, through this journey, with the right answer,” Ingelsby says. “And that, to me, was a more earned payoff than, you know, God came down, and he tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Do this.’ It was more like: I know the right thing to do now.”

Watching the final scene, I found myself waiting for Tom to rap his knuckles on that bedpost and say “Hello? Christ? Hello?” like he had in the premiere, maybe more out of pure curiosity than bitterness this time around. But he never does. I suppose once you have faith that the door is open to you, there’s no need to knock on wood anymore.

Katie Baker

Katie Baker is a senior features writer at The Ringer who has reported live from NFL training camps, a federal fraud trial, and Mike Francesa’s basement. Her children remain unimpressed.