As my community prepares to celebrate Christmas together, this article on North Korea’s spiritual climate has come to mind several times. What drives it home:

Still, there are those who celebrate Christmas behind the barbed wire, unaccompanied by pageantry or feast. I try to picture them, prisoners in their own country, reading about the Nativity aloud in a climate of repression and fear. Their narratives of suffering seem out of sync with the quiet scene as we imagine it…

In the bleakness of North Korea, where even Christmas trees at the border are deemed a threat, the urgent need for God incarnate, God with us, is made achingly real.