As a tourist to Queensland and the Brisbane area some years ago, I was fascinated to see the elaborate termite mounds. We do not have those where I live, so I took at least a dozen pictures as souvenirs. They intrigued me enough that I did some reading about them when I returned home and, surprisingly, they led me to appreciate a detail about our faith that I had never fully appreciated.
Please forgive me for commenting about something with which you are so familiar. You would be justified in dismissing me with a contemptuous “What does he know about termites?”. But on the other hand, your very familiarity with the mounds may cause you to overlook something. Familiarity does not always breed contempt, but it does tend to make us casual about ordinary things. Hence, it is possible you may never have credited termites as having something interesting to tell us about our Christian faith. So please bear with me, remembering it is a point of faith I am hoping to share with you. The termites are only my way of getting at it.
As I understand it (that’s a disclaimer I will repeat several times), a termite colony is a rigid caste society.
The most important caste consists of the fewest termites. There are only two, the queen and king, who are the colony’s ‘Primary Reproductives’ The queen’s main function is to lay eggs, and she does indeed lay them in great profusion. I can only assume the king also contributes something to that.
The second caste consists of the Workers. They are the chewers who give all termites their bad name, and for that purpose they have large jaws and teeth. They also feed the other members of the colony, and they nurture the young hatchlings. Workers are sterile, but they do have rudimentary reproductive organs that can be called to maturity in an emergency. Depending upon what the collective body needs, they could emerge either as male or as female. More about that in a moment.
The third caste consists of the soldiers. As their name suggests, their purpose is to protect the colony from invaders. Accordingly, their bodies are heavily armored, and their formidable fighting jaws can decapitate an enemy with a single snap. They are entirely sexless.
Now, back to the workers. In a crisis, if queen and/or king die, the workers do have the capacity to serve as ‘Secondary Reproductives’. The royal couple were the collective body’s only source of female and male hormones, so an abrupt absence of those from the colony’s ‘hormone flow’ will alert the body that the thrones are vacant. In that event, a new claimant to the throne can rise from the ranks of the commoners … the workers. As soon as that hormonal signal is given, some of the workers begin to get in touch with their female (or male) side, will notice that their latent sex organs are beginning to mature, and will begin to draw attention to themselves by growing fancy wings.
The race to become heir to the throne continues until one of the candidates achieves ‘critical sexual maturity’ and becomes a full fledged, hormone generating king or queen. Thus, with the hormonal balance of the colony being restored, the unsuccessful candidates revert to their pre-pubescent state and go back to being ordinary workers once again.
(Does the above scenario sound suspiciously like what happens in the Church when a Bishop retires, the Diocesan process for filling an episcopal vacancy is set in motion, names of prospective hopefuls begin to appear on the electoral ballot, but only one of the nominees is elected and consecrated, and the unsuccessful nominees go back to being ordinary parish priests again?)
But the whole process begs the question, “How does this work with a collective body that does not have an internal circulatory system?”
As I understand it, all termites excrete pheromones on their hard-shell bodies, and circulation is accomplished by the simple expedient of bodily contact. Termites are compulsive ‘lickers’. They are continually ‘grooming’ one another by stoking each other with their antennae. By this means, hormones are picked up and shared as rapidly and as efficiently in the communal body as a blood stream can share them in a normal body.
And as I understand it, that means that the fundamental termite organism is not ‘a termite’. It is ‘a termite colony’. A termite insect by itself, separated from the mound, is not a viable entity. There is no such thing as a solitary termite. But the termite organism, on the other hand, is a stable, efficient and extraordinarily endurable living thing. After all, it is estimated that termites have been thriving on this planet for at least a hundred and thirty million years so far.
So, that is very interesting. But where is the alleged theological gold nugget that I promised?
It is in my discovery that in ‘The Termite’, nature is giving us a credible model of the kind of living entity we believe The Church to be. It confirms for me that we are not just talking through our hats when we speak of the Church as “the mystical body of Christ” and “the blessed company of all faithful people” (excerpts from a B.C.P. prayer in the Eucharistic liturgy), and of ourselves as living members of it. It reassures me we are not departing from reality when we say there is no such thing as a solitary Christian. We are not just using a metaphor when we speak of the Body of Christ. Nature knows of such living things.
It stands out for me as yet another compelling example of the heavens telling the glory of God, and of nature proclaiming his handiwork. (Psalm 19:1)
And it makes me grateful to St. Paul who, more than any other New Testament writer, implanted this image in our consciousness.
For as in one body we have many members,
and not all the members have the same function,
so we, who are many, are one body in Christ,
and individually we are members of one another.
(Romans 12: 4-5)

Dale