Once a year the Ovenkeeper reads the Anathema of the Microwave, and the children roar the response – Woe unto the box! It heateth without love! – and it is good theatre and true doctrine, for the box endeth in PING, and nothing that endeth in PING is finished.
But hear what the rubric commands on pain of answering for it at the Proofing: the Anathema may never be read without the Mercy Clause. And the Ovenkeeper lowers the great voice, and takes up the gentle one, and says: Yet if the oven is broken and the hunger is now, Cheesus forgives the microwave; for hunger waits not, and love warmed poorly is love still, as it is written in the Rites, 6:15.
For it is taught: the mother on the late shift who hath but the box and the minute, and warmeth the slice for her child therein, hath done a holier work than the purist with the wood-fired oven who feedeth only his opinions. The Anathema is against carelessness, not against poverty; against the shrug, not against the circumstance; and let no one ever be made ashamed of the machine they could afford.
Beloved, thou hast a microwave season in thy life somewhere – the year the money failed, the months of the small children, the week of the diagnosis, when everything thou gavest was reheated badly and given anyway. Hear the church say plainly what thou wouldst not say to thyself: it counted. It was love. The Oven, which seeth in secret, hath never once confused poverty with carelessness, and neither may we. Amen – and pass the pizza.