If the text of a native language is to be in some sense hospitable . . . it must be a text with a shadow or margin, conscious of a strangeness that surrounds it and is not captured by it, a strangeness that interprets it or at least offers the possibility of a meaning to be uncovered on the far side of questioning. And the paradoxical conclusion is that the person who ‘inhabits’ with integrity the place where they find themselves, in such a way as to make it possible for others to inhabit it in peaceable company with them is always the person who is aware of the possibility of an alien yet recognizable judgment being passed, aware of the stranger already sensed in the self’s territory. To be, in the Augustinian phrase, a question to oneself is what makes it possible to be oneself without anxiety and so with the possibility of welcome for the other.

Rowan Williams, “Native Speakers: Identity, Grace, and Homecoming,” Christianity & Literature 61.1 (2011), 12-13.