One reason I love this scene from Rise of the Guardians is the fact that it reminds me of what it means to be an English teacher.

The first part of the scene reminds me so much of teaching writing. In this scene, Jack Frost has just been chosen to become a Guardian, so he has been kidnapped and brought to the North Pole. Here, Nicholas St. North forces Jack to start to figure out and articulate who he is. What drives him? What is his center? Jack is being forced to start to think through and articulate a deeply important concept--who he is--and to make it clear to himself and others. In other words, Jack must learn to speak and act with conviction. 

Like Jack Frost, many of my students, when they first start writing in college, can't really wrap their minds around what they're trying to say. They are vague. Their minds are cluttered. They don't really understand what they read or what they think. And I am trying to help them think it through, and learn to say it - to articulate it clearly. 

The last part of the scene reminds me of what it's like to teach literature: We teachers of literature try to open our students' eyes to marvelous works--and not just marvelous works, but the realities that these works are about--the beauty of nature, the amazing reality of love, the glory of God . . . whatever wonder that the author is writing about.

Stories, poetry, music, art--these things remind us that this world really is full of wonder. But we miss all that wonder when we are so busy that we can't notice it all around us. When Santa tells Jack Frost that it's his job to help young people get a sense of wonder in everything, I'm reminded of how I feel when I teach a poem like Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur," or John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," or a story like C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. I want my students to gain the same sense of wonder that Nicholas St. North has.

If you think that human nature is good and powerful, then you go around frustrated because the perfect society has not yet been achieved. But if you go through life believing that our reason is not that great, our individual skills are not that impressive, and our goodness is severely mottled, then you’re sort of amazed life has managed to be as sweet as it is. You’re grateful for all the institutions our ancestors gave us, like the Constitution and our customs, which shape us to be better than we’d otherwise be. Appreciation becomes the first political virtue and the need to perfect the gifts of others is the first political task.

We live in a capitalist meritocracy that encourages individualism and utilitarianism, ambition and pride. But this society would fall apart if not for another economy, one in which gifts surpass expectations, in which insufficiency is acknowledged and dependence celebrated.

Gratitude is the ability to see and appreciate this other almost magical economy. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

David Brooks, "The Structure of Gratitude"

How does the smallest grain of dust exist? How did nothing become Something? One grain of dust should cause us to fall to our knees in wonder. And yet God gives us much more than a handful of dust. He gives us a leaf! We should fall to our knees in thanksgiving at the gift of a leaf! And yet, when I look out of the window, I see a forest of trees, a tsunami of green that towers over me! And that tidal wave of wonder is made of millions of leaves. Only one would be enough – and yet I have been given a gift of millions, all of which can be seen every day from my office window. I am truly a millionaire! 

Above the trees, I see rolling clouds and a blue sky, and above them is the sun, by the light of which I see everything. And yet there is a light in me that is mightier than the sun. This can be seen from the fact that I can see the sun but the sun cannot see me. The sun is massive and mighty and has a physical power that is awe-inspiring but it is an inanimate object. It has no eyes or heart or mind. I am a soul, made in the image of the One who made me, who can look up at the sun and the moon and the stars, and the trees and my neighbours, and, like the One who made me, can see that they are good.

Joseph Pearce, "Reasons to Be Cheerful: Living in the Best of All Impossible Worlds"

I love Clyde Kilby's Ten Resolutions for Mental Health (remembered by John Piper).

"The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.

Babies have this faculty. That is not surprising. After a few short months they slip out into a brand-new reality. But as they grow up the faculty of wonder seems to diminish. Why is this? Do you know?

If a newborn baby could talk, it would probably say something about what an extraordinary world it had come into. We see how it looks around and reaches out in curiosity to everything it sees.

As words are gradually acquired, the child looks up and says "Bow-wow" every time it sees a dog. It jumps up in its stroller, waving its arms: "Bow-wow! Bow-wow!" We who are older and wiser may feel somewhat exhausted by the child's enthusiasm. ... We are not enthralled. We have seen a dog before.

This rapturous performance may repeat itself hundreds of times before the child learns to pass a dog without going crazy. Or an elephant, or a hippopotamus. But long before the child learns to talk properly ... the world will have become a habit.

A pity, if you ask me.

...

Do not grow up to be one of those people who take the world for granted....

Imagine that one day you are out for a walk in the woods. Suddenly you see a small spaceship on the path in front of you. A tiny Martian climbs out of the spaceship and stands on the ground looking up at you. . . .

What would you think? Never mind, it's not important. But have you ever given any thought to the fact that you are a Martian yourself?

It is obviously unlikely that you will ever stumble upon a creature from another planet. We do not even know that there is life on other planets. But you might stumble upon yourself one day. You might suddenly stop short and see yourself in a completely new light. On just such a walk in the woods.

I am an extraordinary being, you think. I am a mysterious creature.

. . .

[It is not just we ourselves that are mysterious and wonderful--the universe itself is as well. But] sadly, . . . the world itself becomes a habit in no time at all. It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world. And in doing so, we lose something central--something philosophers try to restore. For somewhere inside ourselves, something tells us that life is a huge mystery. This is something we once experienced, long before we learned to think the thought. . . .

For various reasons most people get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background."

Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World

“Here I would like to suggest something that is the keynote of this book: my belief that Lewis’s mind was above all characterized by a willingness to be enchanted and that it was this openness to enchantment that held together the various strands of his life—his delight in laughter, his willingness to accept a world made by a good and loving God, and (in some ways above all) his willingness to submit to the charms of a wonderful story, whether written by an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, by Beatrix Potter, or by himself.

 “What is ‘secretly present in what he said about anything’ is an openness to delight, to the sense that there’s more to the world than meets the jaundiced eye, to the possibility that anything could happen to someone who is ready to meet that anything.”

--Alan Jacobs, The Narnian