Making Blackberry Jam

The danger with seeing ourselves as a finished product is that we don’t give ourselves any room for the messiness that is a vital piece of being refined. We could never eat the sweetness of homemade jam without messing up some pots and spilling a bit of sugar. And doesn’t the jam taste even better because we know the effort that went on in making it?

My Mom made blackberry jam a couple of years back when she visited me. She always says that it’s so completely unfair that we have blackberries growing literally like weeds here in the Northwest and she has struggled so hard to keep her intentionally planted blackberry bushes alive back at home in Utah. She and my Step Dad spent an afternoon picking berries from some roadside bushes and she decided she would make blackberry jam that very evening rather than trying to transport the berries home with her.

I’m not such a jam maker, myself. I can definitely enjoy it on my home made wheat bread but the store bought variety usually serves me well enough. But there is something special in that home made jam given to us by our Mother, isn’t there? So I tried to be helpful while my Mom prepared for the process of jam making.

I don’t recall all of the steps exactly, but I remember we had to pick up a pressure canner and a couple dozen mason jars. We cleaned the berries and boiled their juices with way more sugar than one would expected and lemon juice and an ingredient that was new to me called pectin. We filled the jars with the dark red sugary goodness and sealed them with the pressure cooker.

When all was done, we ended up with neat little jars in nice rows. Cute as a button, as they say. The curious thing I’ve thought about with jam is that we start with such a huge volume of original fruit. And it’s refined to its essence. Where the berries used to take several gallon-sized Ziploc bags to hold all the berries, at the end of the canning process, the contents could be held easily in the corner of my kitchen. We know that the jam is composed of the original stuff but it’s been transformed into something else entirely. One is jam and the other is berries.

Do we sometimes treat ourselves as if we have always been and always will be jam? Sometimes I forget the processes we go through that refine us and change us, day by day, into who we are at any given moment. The danger with seeing ourselves as a finished product is that we don’t give ourselves any room for the messiness that is a vital piece of being refined. We could never eat the sweetness of homemade jam without messing up some pots and spilling a bit of sugar.