James E. McGreevey, who resigned as New Jersey’s governor in 2004, now works for Integrity House in Newark helping people deal with drug problems.

NEWARK — The man once known as “robo-candidate” still acts like a campaigner in the thick of a close race. He does not enter rooms of people so much as plunge into them, hugging and hand-clasping his way from wall to wall. His smile is outsize, and almost as indelible as a campaign poster.

In one sense, James E. McGreevey, the former New Jersey governor, is again campaigning for office: He hopes to be accepted as a candidate for the priesthood in the Episcopal Church, which has begun ordaining openly gay men and women. He has already earned a divinity degree, but his application to proceed with the next step, to become a postulant,was rejected in May 2010. He says he plans to keep trying, and his current work is a kind of test ground of his commitment.

Mr. McGreevey is the newest recovery specialist at a residential drug treatment center in Newark called Integrity House, and one recent morning he zigzagged buoyantly down the street, like the perennial political office-seeker he used to be. Everyone he saw received a holler, a handshake or a lingering moment of schmoozing.

Like a mantra, after each encounter he said, “Life is good!”

That simple declaration is, of course, remarkable for Mr. McGreevey, who resigned as governor of New Jersey in 2004 with an unforgettable speech — his wife by his side — announcing that he was “a gay American.” He had been married twice, had two children and had led a double life, including an affair with a man who precipitated the resignation, Mr. McGreevey said, by trying to blackmail him.

Mr. McGreevey, 53, is out of politics now, divorced from his second wife and living with a new partner, Mark O’Donnell, a business executive. Most of the people he greets at work these days are recovering addicts and prison parolees.

Neither he nor the Episcopal Diocese of Newark would discuss the status of his application for the priesthood. But two people told about the process said that a diocesan committee, after reviewing his qualifications, concluded that too little time had passed since Mr. McGreevey’s dramatic life changes — from secretly to openly gay, from Roman Catholic to Episcopalian, from politician to aspiring clergyman — for anyone, including him, to know if he was ready to be a priest.

Delays in the path to Episcopal ordination are not unusual, and Mr. McGreevey said in an interview that he hoped over time to demonstrate to the diocese that his calling was real. He expects eventually to again seek the church’s approval to begin ordination training, which takes two to four years.

His decision to seek a career in Episcopal ministry came, he says, in the dark days after his resignation. He sought comfort in Catholicism, the faith of his childhood, but at the same time sensed that his previously closeted existence, and what he calls “the total mess of my life,” was at least partly caused by Catholic teaching that condemns homosexual behavior as sinful. The man who once admitted to having sold his soul to his ambition (his own phrase) decided that his true calling was to minister to people he knew best, from personal experience: people who hated themselves.

“I realized that my truest passion was for helping people change through faith in a higher power,” he said. “That meant, for me, belonging to the church. Using my abilities to bring Christian doctrine to a postmodern world.”

He has pursued that idea with the same single-mindedness that propelled him in a decade from a small-town mayoralty to the governorship. After graduating last year with a master of divinity degree from General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in Manhattan, which says a significant number of its students and staff members are gay or lesbian, he started his job at Integrity House.

“He has such internal drive,” said David H. Kerr, director and founder of Integrity House. “He pursues people who most would consider unreachable. Jim reaches them somehow.”

After leaving office, Mr. McGreevey followed the well-worn path of many people, famous and not, who take a big fall and live to tell about it.

He had what he calls a “nervous breakdown.” He entered rehab. He began to tally the cruelties he had committed against his wives and others. He penned a tell-all autobiography, “The Confession,” in which he confessed to many things, including a lifelong addiction to “having a public,” and described his new ambition as attaining “a life organized in harmony with my heart.”