Initially I wondered if this song evoked Joan of Arc, having a moment of weakness and wishing for awhile she were a pagan peasant who had never heard of the catholic God.

Coming from Richard Shindell, who I see wrote it while studying in the seminary, I definitely feel the song has a feminine voice. The first two verses do seem to evoke a romantic pre-Christian goddess worship, recognizing Mary as a figure both raised up and transferred onto older myths.

The third verse seems to cast the singer as a child of
Mary and an illegitimate child (that is, insincere worshipper) of God. She asks Mary to keep this secret, as she pretends to Christianity while having only Mary in her heart, and tells her as her daughter she doesn't care to invoke Armageddon, that that was the Son's deal. ("And never you mind about those seven seals
Daddy was a one shot deal")