To the Band of Brothers: April 2, 2025
If you look out the window in my office, you can just see over the white canopies that shade spectators on the south end of the aquatic center. Peaking behind is the highest point of the pool area… the cross. Made of aluminum, its somewhat warped design jets up from a space on the northern wall, allowing it to reign over swimmers and coaches who make their way into the water at all hours of the day. Nowadays, it mostly goes unperceived as most things do when you get used to them.
But now, something oddly hangs there that catches your attention. Tied to the crossbar, where the vertical beam meets the horizontal one, hangs a single white cap. It doesn’t take much to realize it’s a water polo cap, and blazoned on the side is branded a number… 19. It’s Lucas Osuna’s number.
I’ve hesitated to write anything about the terrible circumstances our school community has experienced over the last few days. You realize words don’t come as easily when your heart seems empty, your mind muddled, and feelings numbed. So many are the questions you ask yourself and hopefully share with others that only make accepting the harsh reality of Lucas’s death more challenging. But accept it we must because there is no getting around the simple fact that every day there’s an empty desk in every sophomore class.
But, as I sit at my desk and write, I look out my window at the white cap hanging on the cross. I realize how that aluminum cross, emptied of the body of Christ, now holds Lucas’s white cap instead. I know what it means. Jesus is telling us he’s got him. There’s something consoling in knowing he does. Something comforting in knowing that just as the cross on Calvary was transformed from a symbol of death to a symbol of life because of who it held in its arms, so is the cross here at Belen transformed into a symbol of life because Jesus holds Lucas in his arms. And ultimately, is there a better place to be?
So, raise him. In prayer, in thought, in song, in story, in words… raise Lucas up to the cross of Christ. Let Jesus have him. Turn him over to the one whose death and resurrection brought life to a fallen world. I don’t know if one person or the whole team thought of placing that white cap on that cross, but whoever it was knew exactly what he or they were doing. There’s hope there. In that one gesture and in that one image, the meaning of Lent and Easter is brought powerfully together.
Auspice Maria.
BELEN JESUIT PREPARATORY SCHOOL
500 SW 127th Avenue, Miami, FL 33184
phone: 305.223.8600 | fax: 305.227.2565 | email: webmaster@belenjesuit.org
500 SW 127th Avenue, Miami, FL 33184
phone: 305.223.8600 | fax: 305.227.2565 | email: webmaster@belenjesuit.org
Belen Jesuit Preparatory School was founded in 1854 in Havana, Cuba by Queen Isabel II of Spain. The task of educating students was assigned to the priests and brothers of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), whose teaching tradition is synonymous with academic excellence and spiritual discipline. In 1961, the new political regime of Cuba confiscated the School property and expelled the Jesuit faculty. The School was re-established in Miami the same year, and over the next decade, continued to grow. Today, Belen Jesuit sits on a 30-acre site in western Dade County, only minutes away from downtown Miami.