Q: Why do I have to say that I am a sinner, "of whom I am the first"? Especially so often during Lent?
A: Mainly to keep you from using this word as a label.
"Sinner” cannot be used as a label, because labels are used to mystify people, and to gain power over them. Labels are used as spells to objectify people as elements of one’s own subjective Tower of Babel, or ongoing revolution. The Marxists have done this with Newspeak: Eurocrats do this with Eurospeak. We do no less in our own private politics whenever we act on our own policy statements and organize the world according to our own plans -- and in so doing, we make "sinner" a most dangerous word.
But the word “sinner” is a good word only if the speaker first sees himself not only as one of these, but as the chief of these. This demotion of self prevents the soul from using this dangerous word as the very worst of "newspeaks," in which people are dehumanized and objectified into stepping stones on the way up some evolutionary or dialectical ladder – or, worse yet, in which the art of the icon is no longer recognized in the person beside you, and you use him as part of your plan for self-promotion.
Overuse and vain repetition has rendered the sound of the word, or its appearance, void of content. To shock myself back into the offense of the term, I have tried replacing it occasionally with the word "failure." As in "Have mercy on me, O God, a failure." "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a failure."
A failure, that is, at human nature, at the demands of all nature, at the Natural Law, let alone the Royal Law of Love. A chooser of the corrosive side of Grace, a shunner of God, a runner from the fish at Tarshish, a spiller of salt, a pillar of salt, a denier, a crier of embarrassment, shock at being caught. A defacer of image, a shirker of likeness. A failure. There, now, I've remembered the meaning again. A sinner.
You see, when I see anyone else, I forget the meaning, the internal side of sinner, and I hurl the hypocrisy of the word at the other. It is a lie when used thus, or newspeak.
This worst of newspeaks is called, as you might have guessed, “judgmentalism,” the inspiration of all bureaucracies since it hails from the lowest, most basic, one.