It takes about 15 minutes for most people, regardless of age, to make their way in to the end of the labyrinth that now fills much of the parish hall at Central Union Church.

Set up for the season of Lent, its focus is the journey, not the speed or the destination.

The labyrinth’s pathway, painted onto a canvas mat, is 29 feet in diameter and illuminated by more than 140 tea lights. Inside the darkened parish hall are cards with simple instructions and inspirational messages for reflection. Large video screens create a decorative backdrop. At the conclusion of the walk, visitors may stand and pray before a large wooden cross.

Margie Smith, a longtime church member, described it as a “very convoluted path … a lovely symbol of our life journey.” She added that everyone’s experience is an individual one and that there’s no one right way to navigate.

This is the second year Central Union has set up a labyrinth, borrowed from Punahou School, as part of its Wednesday night Lenten program through March 16. It starts weekly at 5 p.m. and includes a centering prayer session, soup supper and video discussion series.

The program’s main organizer, Debbie Nakaoka, said the public is invited to use the labyrinth from 5 to 7:30 p.m., and visitors are not required to take part in the rest of the program.

The Rev. Brandon Duran, new minister of spiritual formation, said labyrinths can be used any time of year. “But it has a particularly poignant connection with the spirit and season of Lent in that those 40 days — from Ash Wednesday to Easter — are an embodiment of journey. It hearkens back to the story of the Israelites journeying through the wilderness for 40 years, the journey of Jesus for 40 days in the wilderness.”

Duran added that the “labyrinth provides space for us to take an inward journey as well.”

Smith, who convinced her husband to overcome his hesitance to walk it last year, said, “There’s no wrong way to do it, unless you want to go through it really fast and knock people over. You can go at your pace, you can very quietly and gently pass people if you want to go a little faster. There’s no special prayer you have to say. This is all between you and God, creator of the universe.”

She continued: “It takes a long time to get to the center because you have four quadrants, and you think you’re almost there, then you get swept off into another quadrant, which I find perfectly representative of life. … When you get to the center, I like to think I’m closer to God; I like to imagine that somehow that I’m sort of in the palm of God’s hand, so to speak, and so I can say, ‘Thank you,’ or I can say, ‘Help!’

“The wonderful thing about the labyrinth is it does not require a particular orthodoxy, and to me that’s one of its really strong points. … The older I get, the more religion is about a relationship, an engagement, and not about being right.”

Punahou Chaplain Lauren Buck Medeiros said the winding pathway’s calming, balancing effect can also help schoolchildren. “For children who are going into a test, it prepares them better because their brain is in a balanced state instead of giving in to worry; it calms you. … One reason it appeals to me and schools is because kids can’t sit still. It’s hard for them.”

She added, “In this day and age people are so frazzled and scattered, so tools like this and meditation are finding a place.”

Although a labyrinth and a maze might look alike, with a maze “you have dead ends, and you can choose to go right or left. But in a true (traditional) labyrinth there’s just one path in, and you get to the center and then you come back out.”

Medeiros explained, “A labyrinth shuts off your left brain, where you’re trying to figure things out, (where there’s) this busyness of our mind. A labyrinth fires or lights up your right brain, which is your creative or more spiritual sense.”

The labyrinth dates back 5,000 years, and became part of Christian prayer life during the 1200s, when it began appearing in cathedrals across Europe. Nakaoka said the practice has become a nondenominational, cross-cultural tool also used today in hospitals, prisons, schools and parks.