Literature offers a uniquely apt representational and experiential space for the individual's encounter with the self and God. In the early 1970s, Adriana Zarri (1919-2010) - an "atypical" theologian as Mariangela Maraviglia defines her in _Semplicemente una che vive_ (2020) or "the first woman in Italy who wrote about theology" as Zarri introduces herself half-jokingly in _Teologia del quotidiano_ (2012) - embarked on the "monastic path of a hermitic type" (_Teologia del quotidiano_). However, she remained a lay person and continued to write creatively and for newspapers and magazines. In this talk, drawing on her personal and fictional narrative - her diary from 1936-48 _La mia voce sa ancora di stelle_ (2023), her novel _Quaestio 1968_ (1994), her observations in _Un eremo non è un guscio di lumaca_ (2011), and her essays in _Teologia del quotidiano_ - I focus my attention on the themes of relationality (to God, nature and other humans), prayer, presence and acceptance, love and sexuality, the joy of being, and the bond between the poetic word and mystical experience, which recur in both her literary and theological writings. By reflecting on Zarri's original voice and interrogation of existence and nature, and the Christian God and tradition, I seek to investigate how literature discloses the subject that forms in the encounter with the absolute: what power differentials does it expose or affirm? what knowledge and agency of the subject - and of the female subject in particular - does it produce? Zarri's writing exemplifies a secular, complex feminist thought which is communicated across multiple genres and disciplines (theology, philosophy and literature), accommodates different choices of life and faith without excluding agnostic or atheistic positions, and articulates novel modes of knowledge, participation, ethical awareness and resilience in today's world.